The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from June 2004

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from June 2004

Robert Creeley.(Biography)
June 22, 2004... Although Robert Creeley once remarked that he was "given to write poems" (Collected Essays 496), he began with the expectation that fiction would be his primary preoccupation. Recently his output of creative prose has slowed to a trickle, but...

Louis-Ferdinand Celine.(Biography)
June 22, 2004... Man hardly comes in more than two varieties, wherever he is, whatever he does: workers and pimps... they're either one or the other!... and inventors, the worst kind of jobholder!... they stand condemned!... the writer who doesn't pimp...

Janet Frame.(Biography)
June 22, 2004... When considering the late Janet Frame's oeuvre, critics often focus on the autobiographical aspects of her writing. Frame was, after all, widely known for her life, particularly her movement in and out of mental institutions during a...

David Foster Wallace. Oblivion.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... David Foster Wallace. Oblivion. Little, Brown, 2004. 329 pp. $25.95. Post ascension to the ranks of not only the most talented American writers of his generation but the most talented American writers period, David Foster Wallace finds...

Marshall Boswell. Understanding David Foster Wallace.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Marshall Boswell. Understanding David Foster Wallace. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2003.232 pp. $34.95; Stephen Burn. David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest": A Reader's Guide. Continuum, 2003.96 pp. Paper: $9.95. These are the first two...

Boris Vian. Foam of the Daze.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Boris Vian. Foam of the Daze. Trans. and intro. Brian Harper. Annotation Gilbert Pestureau and Michel Rybalka. TamTam, 2003. 261 pp. Paper: $18.00. This offbeat, surrealist novel has been popular in France for the last half-century. Brian...

Alasdair Gray. The Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Alasdair Gray. The Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories. Canongate, 2004. 181 pp. $21.00. The stories in Alasdair Gray's latest collection range in length from three to over forty pages. They come adorned with Gray's usual collection of...

John Barth. The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... John Barth. The Book often Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories. Houghton Mifflin, 2004. 295 pp. $24.00. This book brings together several uncollected stories, a couple from the 1960s, most from the 1990s. At this presumably late stage in...

Zoran Zivkovic. The Book / The Writer.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Zoran Zivkovic. The Book / The Writer. Trans. Aleksandar B. Nedelijkovic and Alice Copple-Tosic. Prime, 2003. 193 pp. $29.95; paper: $17.95; The Fourth Circle. Trans. Mary Popovic. Afterword by the author. Ministry of Whimsy, 2004. 240 pp....

Graeme Gibson. Five Legs.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Graeme Gibson. Five Legs. Anansi, 2003.268 pp. Paper. $21.95. (Reprint) "Every presentation of history," Walter Benjamin writes, "[must] begin with waking." Five Legs begins with Lucan Crackell, a college professor, waking to a phone call...

Jean-Francois Chassay. L'Angle mort [Blind Spot].(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Jean-Francois Chassay. L'Angle mort [Blind Spot]. Boreal, Montreal, 2002. 333 pp. CA$27.95. Jean-Francois Chassay puts three narrators on stage in L'Angle mort, constructing points of intersection and reciprocal illumination among the...

David Markson. Vanishing Point.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... David Markson. Vanishing Point. Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004. 191 pp. Paper: $15.00. I want, as most literary critics do, to connect themes, metaphors, eccentricities of character. I want to evaluate the pattern of this novel. But I am...

Ursula K. Le Guin. Changing Planes.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Ursula K. Le Guin. Changing Planes. Harcourt, 2003. 246 pp. $22.00; The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Shambhala, 2004. 304 pp. Paper: $16.95. Changing Planes assembles a series of...

Yoel Hoffmann. The Shunra and the Schmetterling.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Yoel Hoffmann. The Shunra and the Schmetterling. Trans. Peter Cole. New Directions, 2004. 96 pp. Paper: $16.95. The Shunra and the Schmetterling is a ramble through the narrator's childhood landscape; the scenes of his formative years...

Thomas Berger. Adventures of the Artificial Woman.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Thomas Berger. Adventures of the Artificial Woman. Simon & Schuster, 2004. 198 pp. $22.00. An analysis of reality is central to Thomas Berger's work, and he sometimes takes one of its vital elements (e.g., time in Changing the Past, gender...

Sam Eisenstein. Cosmic Cow.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Sam Eisenstein. Cosmic Cow. Green Integer, 2003. 513 pp. Paper: $16.95; Nudibranchia. Red Hen, 2003. 108 pp. Paper: $13.95. Sam Eisenstein is at home in the cosmos. You remember the cosmos: the vastness that touched the spiritual, that...

Guy Davenport. The Death of Picasso: New & Selected Writing.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Guy Davenport. The Death of Picasso: New & Selected Writing. Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003. 379 pp. $26.00. Davenport's stories and essays demand focused, repeated attention. Each page is thick with unfamiliar words and gorgeously unusual...

Diane Schoemperlen. Red Plaid Shirt.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Diane Schoemperlen. Red Plaid Shirt. Penguin, 2003. 310 pp. Paper: $14.00. Like her literary compatriot Alice Munro, Diane Schoemperlen eschews conventional notions of storytelling and acknowledges life's refusal to fit into neat narrative...

Mikhail Kononov. The Naked Pioneer Girl.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Mikhail Kononov. The Naked Pioneer Girl. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. Serpent's Tail, 2004. 250 pp. Paper: $14.00. En route to her execution as a traitor near besieged Leningrad on the Russian front, a victim of her own irrepressible innocence,...

Gerald Murnane. The Plains.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Gerald Murnane. The Plains. New Issues, 2003. 111 pp. Paper: $14.00. (Reprint) Despite all the achievements of Australian fiction in the past generation, Gerald Murnane is unmatched in his commitment to experimentation, self-reflexivity,...

Miljenko Jergovic. Sarajevo Marlboro.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Miljenko Jergovid. Sarajevo Marlboro. Trans. Stela Tomasevic. Intro. Ammiel Alcalay. Archipelago, 2004. 195 pp. Paper: $14.00. Sarajevo Marlboro, a collection of twenty-nine stories set in and around the besieged Bosnian capital during the...

Brian Evenson. The Wavering Knife.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Brian Evenson. The Wavering Knife. FC2, 2004. 210 pp. Paper: $13.95. In The Wavering Knife Brian Evenson is an extraordinary meddler in dual realities, particularly concerning the self]other binary. Evenson best exemplifies this duality by...

Boris Fishman, ed. Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Boris Fishman, ed. Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier. Justin, Charles & Co., 2003. 266 pp. $24.95. Is outrage the rule when writing of the erstwhile Soviet Empire? In this polyglot collection, wild takes on new meaning in every...

Pauls Toutonghi. Live Cargo.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Pauls Toutonghi. Live Cargo. Livingston, 2003. 150 pp. $25.00; paper: $14.95. Live cargo is the term an English professor uses to explain to his dog why he's brought a baby robin home. Historically, live cargo refers to slaves, which in...

Moses Isegawa. Snakepit.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Moses Isegawa. Snakepit. Knopf, 2004. 259 pp. $24.00. Isegawa's second novel places the reader in the violence and tyranny of Idi Amin's Uganda of the 1970s. The principle hero, Bat, returns from two years in Britain to make his fortune in...

Sheila Kohler. Stories from Another World.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Sheila Kohler. Stories from Another World. Ontario Review Press, 2003. 152 pp. $22.95. I am pleased that this impressive collection confirms my earlier judgment--I have reviewed three or four of her books in this periodical--that Kohler is...

Janet Kauffman. Five on Fiction.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Janet Kauffman. Five on Fiction. Burning Deck, 2004.64 pp. Paper: $10.00. Janet Kauffman's latest book, Five on Fiction, consists of five sequences, each composed of ten very short prose pieces. Each sequence is ostensibly about one aspect...

Dai Vaughan. Totes Meer.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Dai Vaughan. Totes Meer. Seren, 2003. 175 pp. Paper: 6.95 [pounds sterling]. "The startling experience of temporal elision, of the bridging of the ineradicable years, of the shocking superimposition of youth upon age." This is how Vaughan...

Steve Tomasula. In & Oz.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Steve Tomasula. In & Oz. Ministry of Whimsy, 2003. 144 pp. $25.00. Steve Tomasula's star is rising fast in and out of the fringe genres of the fantastical, the surreal, and the experimental. His name has been appearing in a variety of...

Jim Crace. Genesis.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Jim Crace. Genesis. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003.246 pp. $23.00. For the last two decades Jim Crace's rich corpus has explored how traditional systems of meaning evolve during times of large-scale socioeconomic change. What's especially...

Charles Blackstone. The Week You Weren't Here.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Charles Blackstone. The Week You Weren't Here. Flame, 2004. 326 pp. Paper: 8.00 [pounds sterling]. To launch his first novel, The Week You Weren't Here, Charles Blackstone utilizes a Franz Kafka epigraph: "'It amuses me,' said K., 'only...

Andrew Kaufman. All My Friends Are Superheroes.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Andrew Kaufman. All My Friends Are Superheroes. Coach House, 2003. 111 pp. Paper: $14.95. All My Friends Are Superheroes calls itself a novel, but clocking in at a slim 111 pages and with chapters that can look like sketch-comedy riffs,...

Adolfo Bioy Casares. The Invention of Morel.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Adolfo Bioy Casares. The Invention of Morel. Trans. Ruth L. C. Simms. Prologue Jorge Luis Borges. Intro. Suzanne Jill Levine. Illus. Norah Borges de Torre. New York Review Books, 2003. 103 pp. Paper: $12.95. (Reprint) Clearly, the two...

Matthew Derby. Super Flat Times.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Matthew Derby. Super Flat Times. Back Bay, 2003. 196 pp. Paper $13.95. Made from pieces and fragments, Super Flat Times takes place in a futuristic, war-torn environment among the last remnants of a civilization. It purports< to be the...

Alessandro Baricco. Without Blood.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Alessandro Baricco. Without Blood. Trans. Ann Goldstein. Knopf, 2004.97 pp. $18.00. Without Blood is a slim novel that attempts to capture grand-scale themes and mostly succeeds. In less than one hundred pages, a family is brutally killed,...

Percival Everett and James Kincaid. A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Percival Everett and James Kincaid. A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid. Akashic, 2004. 312 pp. Paper: $15.95. Even the authors confess that this book's...

Ra Page, ed. Comma.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Ra Page, ed. Comma. Comma Press, 2003. 177 pp. Paper: 9.95 [pounds sterling]. As the title suggests, this new anthology of short stories by British writers explores the spaces and voices between events and the moments of pause that occur...

Walter de la Mare. Memoirs of a Midget.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Walter de la Mare. Memoirs of a Midget. Foreword Alison Lurie. Paul Dry Books, 2004. 379 pp. Paper: $14.95. (Reprint) Originally published in 1921, this bizarre book may be de la Mare's best and most multileveled. To even refer to "levels"...

John Taylor. Paths to Contemporary French Literature.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... John Taylor. Paths to Contemporary French Literature. Transaction, 2004. 358 pp. $44.95. The paths that John Taylor invites us to walk in this book are inviting ones: fifty-five luminous essays devoted to the broad avenues and the...

Books received.
June 22, 2004... Adams, Lorraine. Harbor. Knopf, 2004. $23.95. (F) Ahl, Lindsay. Desire. Coffee House, 2004. Paper: $14.00. (F) Ahlman, Larry. Mittens at Sea. Kodiak, 2004. Paper: $14.95. (F) Akutagawa, Ryunosuke. Kappa. Trans. Geoffrey Bownas....