The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from June 2003

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from June 2003

Rick Moody.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... I want to be an American writer. --Rick Moody What have I but my style? --Vladimir Nabokov, a favorite Moody quote It might seem odd, even perverse, to hold a writer accountable for apprentice work that, by his own admission,...

Ann Quin.(Critical Essay)(Biography)
June 22, 2003... Raised under complicated conditions in Brighton, Sussex, Ann Quin nevertheless enjoyed a deep, but short-lived camaraderie with many of the most notable experimental British writers of the 1960s and 1970s. While her first book, Berg (1964),...

Introducing Silas Flannery.(Biography)
June 22, 2003... He was born 18 April 1913 in a residential part of Dublin, the last child in a middle-class family of six. The Ha'penny Bridge, crossing the river Liffy. Joyce, O'Brien, Beckett crossed this bridge. As a youth he wrote poetry on the...

Another besting of both Englishmen.(Short Story)
June 22, 2003... The evidence shows that this is how the murder was committed: Furriskey, the murderer, took up his post about nine o'clock one night in clear moonlight by the corner where Lamont, his victim, had to turn from the street where his office was...

An examination of the work of Silas Flannery.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... About 1941, in a city outside Belfast, I was one of many men conspiring for Irish independence. Of my comrades, some survived to engage in peaceful pursuits; others, paradoxically, fought in the desert and at sea under English colors. Silas...

The man at night's window.(Short Story)
June 22, 2003... The evidence shows that this is how the murder was committed: Lamont, the murderer, took up his post about nine o'clock one night in clear moonlight by the corner where Ms. Lamont, his victim, had to turn from the street where her husband's...

A certain weariness in moonlight.(Short Story)
June 22, 2003... The evidence shows that this is how the murder was committed: Trellis, the murderer, exited the double-leafed door of his house about nine o'clock one night in clear moonlight by the corner where Furriskey, his victim, had taken up his post....

Imitation(/)reproduction: Flannery's "style".(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... The Jews have discussed for a million years the coming of the Messiah; they discuss his message and what it will be. Perhaps the message of the Messiah is wait. --Helene Cixous Why do I dedicate this essay to Helene Cixous? First of...

The Cask of Amontillado.(Short Story)
June 22, 2003... It was about dusk, one evening during the supreme madness of the carnival season, that I encountered my friend. He accosted me with excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much. The man had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his...

The second degree.(an analysis of Flannery and The Cask of Amontillado)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... No doubt the moment we turn a source into a subject (for an article, for a conversation) there is nothing left but to give it predicates; in the case of Flannery, however, such predication unfailingly takes the most facile and trivial form,...

Eveline.(Short Story)
June 22, 2003... Every morning before his classes begin Frank does an hour of jogging; he feels the need to move, and also to relieve his nerves. During the day, if he does not go to the campus or into the library, he does not know where to go; therefore he...

A general statement about fiction: unpacking the work of Silas Flannery.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Adventavis asinus, pulcher et fortissimus: these words may have been intended as a general statement about fiction. So books like Finnegan's Wake, Balzac's Peau de chagrin, and Musil's Man without Qualities have their fates. Silas Flannery,...

Selected bibliography.(Bibliography)
June 22, 2003... Hammerman, Zachary Flannery's Works Another Besting of Both Englishmen (1950); out of print. "The Cask of Amontillado" (1946). Trinity College Journal of Literature Volume X, Issue 2; 1946. A Certain Weariness in Moonlight...

Don DeLillo. Cosmopolis.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Scribner, 2003. 209 pp. $25.00. Cosmopolis is set in April 2000, a postmillennial, pre-9/11 time significant for being a month removed from the NASDAQ's record-setting closing number, 5048.62. This, then, is the beginning of the end of the...

Aleksandar Hemon. Nowhere Man.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2002. 242 pp. $23.95. Josef Pronek appears in Hemon's novel as the narrator, who, calling himself "Victor Plevchuk," tours an English-language school for immigrants like himself while seeking work in Chicago. In one...

Kathy Acker. Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Ed. Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper. Intro. Jeanette Winterson. Grove, 2002. 335 pp. Paper: $15.00; "Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective" and "The Burning Bombing of America: The Destruction of the U.S." Grove, 2002. 201 pp. Paper: $14.00. "I just...

Joseph McElroy. Actress in the House.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Overlook, 2003. 432 pp. $26.95. Joseph McElroy's dazzling, multidimensional novel brilliantly unfolds a seismic map that charts the tumultuous, uncertain relationship between Becca Lang and Bill Daley. The novel opens as Daley witnesses an...

Rikki Ducornet. Gazelle.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Knopf, 2003. 208 pp. $21.00. Rikki Ducornet scares me. I don't know where all this stuff comes from: the capitalist Tubbs arriving in Egypt and wanting instantly to turn it into a pudding with raisins, Secundo ejaculating into the flames...

Robert Ostaszewski. Troje pomscimy (Get Even for Troy).(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Ikon, Krakow, 2002. 193 pp. No price given. Robert Ostaszewski's second novel is an ironic guide through the parallel worlds of contemporary Poland. At first the division of the book into three parts--the Gierek Era, the Jaruzel Era, and...

Lynne Tillman. This Is Not It.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Distributed Art Publishers, 2002. 283 pp. $27.50. Lynne Tillman's This Is Not It offers a pastiche of stylistic responses to contemporary works by such artists as Jeff Koons, Kiki Smith, Barbara Kruger, and Peter Dreher. Through her own...

Paul Auster. The Book of Illusions.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Holt, 2002. 321 pp. $24.00. In his best novel in over a decade, Paul Auster revisits several of his familiar themes: traumatic regrets, mysterious pasts, chains of miraculous and diabolic coincidences, and the quest for redemption through...

Alain Robbe-Grillet. Repetition.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. Richard Howard. Grove, 2003. 191 pp. $23.00. Marking Robbe-Grillet's return to fiction after a twenty-year absence, Repetition details the story of a secret agent, Henri Robin, as he makes his way through Europe in the late 1940s....

Oleg Pavlov. Povesti Poslednikh Dnei (Tales of Recent Days).(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Tsentropoligraf, Russia, 2001. No price given. Oleg Pavlov is one of the most gifted exemplars of what has been dubbed the "renaissance in Russian literature." Like all of the great Russian writers, he eschews overt social and political...

Nicholson Baker. A Box of Matches.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Random House, 2003. 178 pp. $19.95. To say that no one writes like Nicholson Baker is at once a compliment and a simple fact. Whether he is writing about sex, libraries, or corporate bathrooms, Baker's works are characterized by humor,...

Alicia Borinsky. All Night Movie.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. Cola Franzen with the author. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2002. 204 pp. Paper: $15.95. There is something tantalizingly audacious about a tango, the paradox of bold passion and playful immediacy despite the intricate choreography and...

Lyn Hejinian. Happily.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Post-Apollo, 2000. 39 pp. Paper: $7.00; Slowly. Tuumba, 2002. 43 pp. Paper: $10.00; The Beginner. Tuumba, 2002. 42 pp. Paper: $10.00. These short books by poet, essayist, and translator Lyn Hejinian are not quite a series, but read...

John Banville. Shroud.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Knopf, 2003. 257 pp. $25.00. Banville gives us another thrilling exhibition. He returns (obsessively?) to his favorite themes of evidence, deception, and investigation, and his dazzling metaphorical power grips us. Vander, his central...

Juan Rulfo. Pedro Paramo.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Photos Josephine Sacabo. Univ. of Texas Press, 2002. 161 pp. $35.00. This handsome reissue of Juan Rulfo's classic Pedro Paramo, occasioned by the series of Josephine Sacabo photographs that appear here...

Mehis Heinsaar. Vanameeste nappaja (Snatcher of Old Men).(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Tuum, Estonia, 2001. 155 pp. No price given. Mehis Heinsaar attracted attention in Estonia with his earliest short stories, and his first book, Vanameeste nappaja, received the prestigious Betti Alver award. The book consists of sixteen...

Joanna Scott. Tourmaline.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Little, Brown, 2003. 279 pp. $23.95. In Tourmaline Joanna Scott's lustrous Mediterranean landscapes echo the shadowy Italian romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne and John Hawkes. Inspired by her own extended tour of Italy, Scott weaves a simple...

Kenzaburo Oe. Somersault.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. Philip Gabriel. Grove, 2003. 576 pp. $29.95. In his first new novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Kenzaburo Oe offers an examination of the nature of faith when it is balanced against the potential for human...

Javier Marias. The Man of Feeling.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. New Directions, 2003. 182 pp. $22.95. Readers in the United States have been slower than those elsewhere to discover the sophisticated pleasures of Javier Marias, the fifty-two-year-old Spanish author who has...

Joseph Heller. Catch as Catch Can: the Collected Stories and Other Writings.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Park Bucker. Simon & Schuster, 2003. 333 pp. $25.00. This volume collects all of the short fiction Joseph Heller published in his lifetime. It also includes five previously unpublished stories, a variety of...

Franck Pavloff. Matin brun (Brown Morning).(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Cheyne Editeur, France, 1998. 12 pp. 1.00 [euro]. A psychologist and children's rights expert who has spent years working for humanitarian causes in Africa and South America, Pavloff is a politically engaged French novelist and children's...

Antonio Lobo Antunes. The Inquisitors' Manual.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. Richard Zenith. Grove, 2003. 435 pp. $25.00. Bearing a certain resemblance to The Sound and the Fury, Antunes's most recent novel to be published in English recounts the fall of a Portuguese family in the time preceding and following...

Jay Cantor. Great Neck.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Knopf, 2003. 703 pp. $27.95. While not yet a large enough collection to call a subgenre, several books have appeared in the past few years with enough in common to hint at one. Their authors seem to have sublimated the lessons of...

Vassilis Vassilikos. The Few Things I Know about Glafkos Thrassakis.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. Karen Emmerich. Seven Stories, 2002. 356 pp. $24.95. Vassilikos creates an unnamed narrator who is writing a biography of the fictional writer Glafkos Thrassakis (pen name for Lazarus Lazaridis). An "afterword' devoted to...

Nenad Velickovic. Sahib.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Stubovi Kulture, Serbia, 2002. 176 pp. 5.00 [euro]. A young Englishman comes to postwar Bosnia, which lingers between "a preserve and a colony," to work on the implementation of Western principles and policies. Travel to another country and...

Robert Coover. The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director's Cut.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Grove, 2002. 405 pp. $24.00. In Briar Rose (1996) and Ghost Town (1998) Robert Coover took two identity- and culture-defining narrative genres--the fairy tale and the American Western--and turned them inside out. The more ambitious Lucky...

Ken Kalfus. The Commissariat of Enlightenment.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Ecco, 2003. 295 pp. $24.95. The years between the deaths of Tolstoy and Lenin were years in which the most artfully successful Russian revolutionaries recognized the emergent technology of the moving picture for its awesome ability to...

Edward Carey. Alva & Irva: the Twins Who Saved a City.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Harcourt, 2003. 207 pp. $24.00. Edward Carey has carved himself a nifty little niche in the atmosphere of this world, by which I mean to say, he has, in only two books, successfully blown this world to slivers, and he seems poised to write...

Christian Oster. My Big Apartment.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. and intro. Jordan Stump. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2002. 155 pp. Paper: $20.00; A Cleaning Woman. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Other Press, 2003. 197 pp. $22.00. Since Preston Sturges, the American romantic comedy--with its anatomy of the...

Brian Evenson. Dark Property.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Black Square/Hammer, 2002.132 pp. Paper: $14.00. Brian Evenson appreciates the discordant beauty of Old Testament verse and appropriates it in his novel Dark Property. In what might be called neobiblical language, Evenson alternates between...

Alison Bundy, Keith Waldrop, and Rosmarie Waldrop, eds. One Score More: the Second Twenty Years of Burning Deck, 1982-2002.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Burning Deck, 2002. 240 pp. Paper: $15.00. Burning Deck is one of those amazing independent publishers that seems to be in an eternal state of creation and recreation. What they publish consistently seems fresh, new, and noteworthy. Like...

Jim Knipfel. The Buzzing.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Vintage, 2003. 259 pp. $12.00. Roscoe Baragon, the hero of this wonderfully zany and grim novel, is a reporter. He cannot take news seriously--he realizes that the usual catastrophes don't really interest him. All reporters repeat the same...

Bruce Fleming. a Structure Opera.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Six Gallery, 2002. 195 pp. Paper: $12.95. Novelist Jim Chapman (In Candyland It's Cool to Feed on Your Friends) says that novels are food. If so, Bruce Fleming has served up with his latest offering, A Structure Opera, what could best be...

Stewart Home. 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Canongate, 2003. 182 pp. Paper: $13.00. Literary provocateur Stewart Home marries the pulp pornography of his previous skinhead novels with fundamentally more "highbrow" attributes--literary criticism, political theory, and other avenues...

Curt Leviant. "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet" and "Weekend in Mustara.".(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2002. 156 pp. $21.95. In these two novellas, two American Jewish scholars set out for foreign lands to find letters and artifacts from the dead that will advance their academic careers. The places they travel to,...

Gabriel Josipovici. Goldberg: Variations.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Carcanet, 2002. 180 pp. Paper: 9.05 [pounds sterling]. Is a work of art supposed to calm you down or wake you up? Does literature function best when it solves problems or leaves readers with philosophical quandaries? These questions appear...

Ludwig Harig. The Trip to Bordeaux.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. Susan Bernofsky. Burning Deck, 2003. 103 pp. Paper: $10.00. While German writer Ludwig Harig has earned a strong reputation in Europe over the last four decades, it's only now that his inventive work is being translated into English....

Pedro de Jesus. Frigid Tales.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. Dick Cluster. City Lights, 2002. 105 pp. Paper: $11.95. Despite the title, there is nothing frigid about these tales--what appears to be coldness is all on the surface. True, the characters of these six interrelated stories are often...

George Singleton. The Half-Mammals of Dixie.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Algonquin, 2002. 287 pages. $22.95. In his second collection, George Singleton proves that southern humorists can definitely strike more than one note. Like his northern counterpart, George Saunders, Singleton manages both to write stories...

Elisabeth Sheffield. Gone.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... FC2, 2003. 268 pp. Paper: $13.95. Stella Vanderzee is lost and almost alone in upper New York State. She's looking for a painting, a Winslow Homer, an inheritance from her grandfather that will help her escape the series of dead-end jobs...

Ignacio Padilla. Shadow without a Name.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. Peter Bush and Anne McLean. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. 192 pp. $22.00. Padilla's first novel to be translated into English starts off simply enough: pointsman Viktor Kretzschmar is being charged with causing a terrible train...

Ludmila Ulitskaya. Medea and Her Children.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. Arch Tait. Schocken, 2002. 320 pp. $24.00. Ludmila Ulitskaya's Medea resembles the tragic villainess in name only. We meet this childless, introverted, fiercely independent, sweetly redoubtable Medea inhabiting an almost magical...

George Garrett. Southern Excursions: Views on Southern Letters in My Time.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Ed. James Conrad McKinley. Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2003. 315 pp. $35.00. Although the "excursions" in this surprising collection vary in length and form--essays, book reviews, tributes, introductions, dialogues--they are all...

Brian Littlefair. Desert Burial.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Holt, 2002. 254 pp. $25.00. Although a first novel, Brian Littlefair's Desert Burial reads like the work of a mature novelist--intriguing, carefully crafted, and intellectually engaging. Despite imagining a future of relative world peace,...

Juan Tovar. Creature of a Day.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. Leland H. Chambers. McPherson, 2002. 160 pp. $20.00. Creature of a Day is Mexican novelist Juan Tovar's first book to be translated into English. This edition also contains material that is not yet available in the original Spanish....

Zoran Zivkovic. The Writer.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. Alice Copple-Tosic. Polaris/Ministry of Whimsy, 2002. 81 pp. Paper: $8.00. Zivkovic is a Serbian writer whose stories often run in the tradition of Calvino/Borges-style fantasy--i.e., he'd be illustrated by the Brothers Quay, not...

Christian Gailly. An Evening at the Club.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. Susan Fairfield. Other Press, 2003. 133pp. $22.00. An enigmatic painter-narrator tells the story of his friend, a middle-aged former jazz musician and alcoholic who, one night, starts drinking and playing again after ten years of...

Robert Phillips. News about People You Know.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Texas Review Press, 2002. 175 pp. Paper: $18.95. "News about people we know": to illuminate the already exposed. To shed light upon areas where there is no mystery is a far more imposing task than merely shedding light upon mystery. In...

Lewis Robinson. Officer Friendly and Other Stories.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... HarperCollins, 2003. 228 pp. $23.95. Lewis Robinson's first collection is outstanding. These eleven stories reveal, by way of impeccable prose, the intricate world of rural Port Allison, Maine. In "The Diver" Peter, a restaurant owner from...

Mark Dunn. Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Anchor, 2002. 208 pp. Paper: $12.00. This odd, strangely moving novel, originally published in 2001 by Random House, teases us at first. The title, a girl's name, suggests a series of letters: l, m, n, o, p. The subtitle tells us that it...

Mark Swartz. Instant Karma.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... City Lights, 2002. 136 pp. Paper: $11.95. Among the many ailments suffered by David Felsenstein, the narrator of Mark Swartz's Instant Karma, are paranoia, hallucinatory tinnitus, and a "directional deficiency" for which he wears a magnet...

Carter Scholz. The Amount to Carry.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Picador, 2003. 208 pp. $23.00. Carter Scholz's The Amount to Carry contains twelve inventive stories that demonstrate the range and the limits of intelligence, as Scholz grounds his stories in math, science, and nature, with references as...

Italo Calvino. Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Trans. Martin McLaughlin. Pantheon, 2003. 255 pp. $23.00. Known for fanciful narrative experiments like Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino is revealed in a less whimsical light in Hermit in Paris, a...

Carole Maso. Beauty Is Convulsive: the Passion of Frida Kahlo.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Counterpoint, 2003. 170 pp. $24.00. Amid the recent resurgence of interest in Frida Kahlo, Carole Maso's Beauty Is Convulsive offers an intimate tribute to the life and art of the Mexican painter. Maimed in a bus accident as a teenager,...

Rosmarie Waldrop. Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabes.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Foreword Richard Stamelman. Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2002. 205 pp. Paper: $17.95. "Edmond Jabes does not write novels," Rosmarie Waldrop tells us. "Nor poems for that matter. He claims to write in a new genre, 'the book.' "Indeed, one of the...

Joseph Dewey, Steven G. Kellman, and Irving Malin, eds. UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo's "Underworld.".(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Univ. of Delaware Press, 2002. 219 pp. $39.50. The names of the editors suggest the background and experience that went into the compilation of this collection of critical essays and bibliographical information (reviews and articles to 2000...

Nick Montfort and William Gillespie. 2002: A Palindrome Story in 2002 Words.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Illus. Shelley Jackson. Spineless, 2002. 24 pp. Paper: $16.00. Frequent readers of RCF are more likely than most connoisseurs of contemporary fiction to be titillated by Oulipian fiction. The print arrival of 2002: A Palindrome Story serves...

Books received.
June 22, 2003... Adonis. If Only the Sea Could Sleep: Love Poems. Trans. Kamal Boullata, Susan Einbinder, and Mirene Ghossein. Ed. Mirene Ghossein and Kamal Boullata. Green Integer, 2003. Paper: $11.95. (P) Agee, Jonis. Acts of Love on Indigo Road. Coffee...