The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from June 2001

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from June 2001

Janice Galloway.(author)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2001... Notable for her interest in physicality, both of the human body and of the literary text, Janice Galloway writes articles, stories, and novels that take a woman's perspective as their basis, pointedly emphasizing what a departure from the norm...

Thomas Bernhard.(Austrian author)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2001... The essential details of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard's formative years are unforgettably recorded in his autobiographical work Gathering Evidence, which is written in the same iconoclastic, relentlessly repetitive style of lyrical...

Robert Steiner.(author)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2001... Robert Steiner belongs to his age, a troubled period that has witnessed the demise of all those consecrated categories that formerly enabled us to grasp literary and artistic phenomena. Dubious about ideas as abstractions, the writer will fall...

Elizabeth Bowen.(author)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2001... In 1981 the critic Hermione Lee felt she had to open her excellent book-length critical study of Elizabeth Bowen by saying: "I have written a critical study of Elizabeth Bowen because there is a great deal to be said about her work, and because...

Gold Fools.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Gilbert Sorrentino. Gold Fools. Green Integer, 2001. 368 pp. Paper: $14.95. Sorrentino's long-awaited follow-up to Red the Fiend is a fond and wildly comic burlesque of a 1924 boys' adventure book. Though Gold Fools consists entirely of...

The Absent City.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Ricardo Piglia. The Absent City. Trans. Sergio Waisman. Duke Univ. Press, 2000. 147 pp. Paper: $15.95. This is the third of Piglia's books to be translated into English, and it marks him as a worthy successor to the likes of Borges and...

Undercurrents.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Marie Darrieussecq. Undercurrents. Trans. Linda Coverdale. New Press, 2001. 114 pp. $21.95. Although it is rare to read a novel that contains absolutely no dialogue, it's even rarer to find an author who can write such a novel with grace...

The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Carlos Fuentes and Julio Ortega, eds. The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories. Vintage, 2000. 380 pp. Paper: $14.00. This collection of over three dozen authors from the past century is a testament to both the power and development of...

A Fifth of November.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Paul West. A Fifth of November. New Directions, 2001.340 pp. $25.95. Readers familiar with Paul West know well that each new novel stands as an imaginative foray into the unexpected. In recent years he has concentrated on overlooked...

John Henry Days.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Colson Whitehead. John Henry Days. Doubleday, 2001.389 pp. $24.95. John Henry Days is a big, ambitious novel in the line of the big, ambitious novels of the past ten years. Its closest relative is clearly Don DeLillo's Underworld--John...

Monstruary.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Julian Rios. Monstruary. Trans. Edith Grossman. Knopf, 2001. 225 pp. $25.00. Rios is fascinated by images of transformation and metamorphosis. His novels--Larva: a Midsummer Night's Babel, Poundemonium, and Loves That Bind--suggest that...

Letters from Hanusse.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Joshua Haigh. Letters from Hanusse. Ed. Douglas Messerli. Green Integer, 2000.291 pp. Paper: $12.95. A nightmarish vision of malevolence and depravity, Letters from Hanusse is the third volume in the Structure of Destruction series,...

Here's to You, Jesusa!(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Elena Poniatowska. Here's to You, Jesusa! Trans. Deanna Heikkinen. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 303 pp. $24.00. Originally published in 1969, this text is an excellent example of the intersections of novel, documentary, and testimonial....

This Is Not a Novel.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... David Markson. This Is Not a Novel. Counterpoint, 2001. 190 pp. Paper: $15.00. David Markson's new book ventures fearlessly in the direction pointed to by his most recent two novels, Wittgenstein's Mistress and Reader's Block. In form, it...

16 Categories of Desire.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Douglas Glover. 16 Categories of Desire. Goose Lane Editions [Canada], 2000. 186 pp. Paper: $18.95. Douglas Glover's characters range from the flailingly psychotic to the flatly honest, the desperately sad to the gleefully repressed. All...

Father of the Four Passages.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Father of the Four Passages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 233 pp. $23.00. Sonia Kurisu understands that art, or at least worthwhile art, is a way through darkened corridors, a difficult often graceless movement toward...

I'm Gone.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Jean Echenoz. I'm Gone. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New Press, 2001. 195 pp. $22.95. No longer satisfied with a life of monotonous routines, Felix Ferrer, a moderately successful art dealer, begins I'm Gone by walking out on his wife. From...

Whose Song? and Other Stories.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Thomas Glave. Whose Song? and Other Stories. City Lights, 2000. 249 pp. $12.95. This collection follows the success of the title story, "Whose Song?," which won the O. Henry award in 1997. That story--a difficult one revealing the desires...

Soul Mountain.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Gao Xingjian. Soul Mountain. Trans. Mabel Lee. HarperCollins, 2000. 527 pp. $27.00. Although last year Gao Xingjian became China's first Nobel laureate (much to the annoyance of Beijing), until very recently little of this remarkable...

Loverboy.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Victoria Redel. Loverboy. Graywolf Press, 2001. 208 pp. $21.95. Loverboy, winner of the S. Mariella Gable Prize, is poet Victoria Redel's debut novel about a mother's insatiable obsession with her young son, Paul. In concise, precise, often...

Silence on the Shores.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Leila Sebbar. Silence on the Shores. Trans. Mildred Mortimer. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2001. 96 pp. Paper: $15.00. Leila Sebbar's minimalist style wielded in a stream-of-consciousness format further enhances the world of immigrant...

On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Peter Handke. On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House. Trans. Krishna Winston. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. 186 pp. $23.00. Peter Handke's new novel envisions a panoramic dreamscape that displays a remarkable sequence of events in the life...

Head.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... William Tester. Head. Sarabande, 2000. 197 pp. $19.95. Tester's first book, Darling, was a tender novel cum prose poem about a boy's sexual attraction to the family cow. In Head, which won Sarabande's 1999 Mary McCarthy Prize (Amy Hempel...

Trailer Girl and Other Stories.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Terese Svoboda. Trailer Girl and Other Stories. Counterpoint, 2001. 240 pp. $23.00. Svoboda's stories explore disturbing cycles of"beatings and deprivings," violence and poverty. Fourteen hauntingly detailed short-short stories provide...

The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Nina Berberova. The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories. Trans. Marian Schwartz. New Directions, 2001. 410 pp. $14.95. "An age... had ended with August 1921," Nina Berberova writes in her autobiography, The Italics Are Mine. "All that came...

The Biographer's Tale.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... A.S. Byatt. The Biographer's Tale. Knopf, 2001. 307 pp. $24.00. Phineas Nanson, an unhappy graduate student, abruptly decides to leave the study of literary criticism in the middle of one of Gareth Butcher's famous theoretical lectures on...

Love.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Peter Nadas. Love. Trans. Imre Goldstein. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. 134 pp. $20.00. In Love Peter Nadas conveys the dreadful disorientation of a prolonged, paranoid, marijauna-induced hallucination that nearly overwhelms an unnamed...

A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Jonathan Safran Foer, ed. A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell. Distributed Art Publishers, 2001. 240 pp. $27.50. The twenty-two verbal assemblages here testify to the profound and...

Love, etc.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Julian Barnes. Love, etc. Knopf, 2001. 240 pp. $23.00. A decade on, the protagonists of Talking It Over return to talk some more. The familiar voices that narrate this sequel are witty, insightful, and pleasingly differentiated, yet a wary,...

The Hell Screens.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Alvin Lu. The Hell Screens. Four Wails Eight Windows, 2000. 195 pp. $22.00. Public/Private; Natural/Supernatural; Past/Present; Fact/Fiction: imagine a novel where all the dichotomies people assume to get through their work-a-day lives are...

Letters to Wendy's.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Joe Wenderoth. Letters to Wendy's. Verse Press, 2000. 296 pp. Paper: $14.00. It's difficult to assess this book with anything other than a description, as it's nearly sui generis. Each page consists of entries made on a customer comment...

Cool for You: A Novel.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Eileen Myles. Cool for You: A Novel. Soft Skull Press, 2000. 196 pp. Paper: $14.00. According to its back cover, Eileen Myles's Cool for You is a "nonfiction novel" about the "downbeat progress of a girl growing up in working-class Boston"...

Loving Sabotage.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Amelie Nothomb. Loving Sabotage. Trans. Andrew Wilson. New Directions, 2000. 144 pp. $21.95. In her afterword Amelie Nothomb writes: "Loving Sabotage tells a true story: my own." Regardless of the accuracy of such an admission, Loving...

Eclipse.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... John Banville. Eclipse. Knopf, 2001. 211 pp. $23.00. The narrator of this ghostly novel is a middle-aged actor. He returns to his birthplace in the country after he forgets his lines on stage. He recognizes that he cannot complete his...

The Hunter.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Julia Leigh. The Hunter. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000. 176 pp. $20.00. The Hunter, published in Australia in 1999, has received much critical acclaim and has already been translated into French, German, and Italian. While the story is...

Distortion.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Stephen Beachy. Distortion. Harrington Park Press, 2001. 318 pp. Paper: $22.95. The best of American gay/lesbian fiction tends to discuss sexuality not simply for the sake of discussing sex, but to use sexuality as a metaphor for reality....

The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Anne Carson. The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. Knopf, 2001. 147 pp. $22.00. In her new work Anne Carson creates a rare and unusual blend of literary muses. Poetry and prose are composed in the form of an erotic...

The Death of Vishnu.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Manil Suri. The Death of Vishnu. Norton, 2001. 295 pp. $24.95. This devastating novel opens on the staircase of a slum apartment building where a man lies dying. The inhabitants of the building--families Vishnu has served, if somewhat...

dem.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... William Melvin Kelley. dem. Coffee House Press, 2000. 164 pp. Paper: $14.95. Originally published in 1967, dem is being reissued as part of Coffee House Press's Black Arts Movement series, and comes equipped with a long introduction by...

The Chase.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Alejo Carpentier. The Chase. Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001. 122 pp. Paper: $14.95; Alejo Carpentier. The Lost Steps. Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001. 278 pp. Paper: $15.95. Alejo Carpentier, who has been called the inventor of magical...

The Lost Steps.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Alejo Carpentier. The Chase. Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001. 122 pp. Paper: $14.95; Alejo Carpentier. The Lost Steps. Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001. 278 pp. Paper: $15.95. Alejo Carpentier, who has been called the inventor of magical...

Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Mark Ford. Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams. Foreword by John Ashbery. Cornell Univ. Press, 2000. 312 pp. $29.95. The famous procede of Raymond Roussel, with its deformation of first line to last ("Les lettres du blanc sur les...

Lies: A Diary, 1986-1999.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Ned Rorem. Lies:A Diary, 1986-1999. Counterpoint, 2000. 416 pp. $30.00. Lies is the latest installment of Ned Rorem's diaries, a chronicle he has been keeping since the early 1950s and releasing at intervals between collections of essays,...

Pynchon and "Mason & Dixon".(Review)
June 22, 2001... Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin, eds. Pynchon and "Mason & Dixon." Univ. of Delaware Press, 2000. 228 pp. $39.50. Eleven essays (and one generous bibliography on various critical responses by Clifford Mead) are here gathered to elucidate,...

Blackbird Dust: Essays, Poems, Photographs.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Jonathan Williams. Blackbird Dust: Essays, Poems, Photographs. Turtle Point Press, 2000. 243 pp. Paper: $16.95. Jonathan Williams hit the scene half a century ago when he arrived at Black Mountain College to study photography but left as a...

Marcel Proust.(Review)
June 22, 2001... William Carter. Marcel Proust. Yale Univ. Press, 2000. 1,024 pp. $35.00. The first new biography in English of Proust in thirty-six years, updating Geroge D. Painter's masterful two-volume effort and taking critical advantage of Philip...

Autodafe #1.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Christian Salmon, ed. Autodafe #1. International Parliament of Writers. Seven Stories Press, 2001. 274 pp. Paper: $16.95. The International Parliament of Writers was created in 1993 as a human rights organization intent on protecting...

Letters from the Editor: "The New Yorker"'s Harold Ross.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2001... Harold Ross. Letters from the Editor: "The New Yorker"'s Harold Ross. Ed. Thomas Kunkel. Modern Library, 2000. 426 pp. $26.95. Harold Ross was one of the most influential magazine editors of the first half of the twentieth century and this...

Books Received.(Bibliography)
June 22, 2001... Abreu, Caio Fernando. Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga: A B-Novel. Trans. with an afterword by Adria Frizzi. Univ. of Texas Press, 2001. Paper: $15.95. (F) Adler, Laure. Marguerite Duras: A Life. Trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen. Univ. of...