The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from June 2005

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from June 2005

William H. Gass.(Biography)
June 22, 2005... "My lips are highly rated, and my fingers celebrated, as for my tongue it's equally fun, however it's rotated..." --Omensetter's Luck This limerick is uttered by Jethro Furber of Omensetter's Luck, one of William Gass's beleaguered...

Robert Lowry.(Biography)
June 22, 2005... What did you say with Robert Lowry about love? Do you know anything about what it means for a humanish human being? Does he know better? --Simone de Beauvoir to Nelson Algren, 5 March 1951 As Lionel Trilling and others debated the death...

Ross Feld.(Biography)
June 22, 2005... He met her in the Library Where all things have their history But nothing living may endure--Among the dogs of literature. --Henry Weinfield, "Beauty and the Beast" (Sorrows 62) 1 Ross Feld (1947-2001) was the author of four...

Gilbert Sorrentino. Lunar Follies.(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Gilbert Sorrentino. Lunar Follies. Coffee House Press, 2005. 143 pp. Paper: $14.00. Sorrentino is a master, but a particular specialty of his has always been illustrating the "eight million ways to step off the cliff"--or lose one's...

Boris Vian. Autumn in Peking.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Boris Vian. Autumn in Peking. Trans. Paul Knobloch. TamTam Books, 2005. 283 pp. Paper: $18.00. Virtually unknown to the English-speaking world, Boris Vian's fiction remains highly popular in his native France. L'Automne a Pekin is his...

Ian McEwan. Saturday.(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Ian McEwan. Saturday. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2005. 294 pp. $26.00. As if to verify W. H. Auden's claim that "Poetry makes nothing happen," a poem keeps a thug from doing something dreadful to the family whose house he has invaded. The...

Javier Marias. Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 1: Fever and Spear.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Javier Marias. Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 1: Fever and Spear. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. New Directions, 2005. 387 pp. $24.95. Jacques Deza, the narrator of Javier Marias's newly translated Fever and Spear, is languishing personally and...

Julio Cortazar. The Diary of Andreas Fava.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Julio Cortazar. The Diary of Andreas Fava. Trans. Anne McLean. Archipelago Books, 2005. Paper: $14.00. Granted, The Diary of Andres Fava isn't Hopscotch. Nor is it 62: A Model Kit. Yet for fans of Cortazar it's a reason to celebrate, since...

Bilge Karasu. The Garden of Departed Cats.(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Bilge Karasu. The Garden of Departed Cats. Trans. Aron Aji. New Directions, 2003. 256 pp. Paper. $18.95. Nameless characters move about a cryptic text-scape, an elusive environment constructed from the lyric energy of language, a...

Steve Erickson. Our Ecstatic Days.(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Steve Erickson. Our Ecstatic Days. Simon & Schuster, 2005. 317 pp. $24.00. Linked to Erickson's The Sea Came in at Midnight (1999), Our Ecstatic Days continues the story of Kristin, following her through several shifts in identity and into...

Robert Majzels. Apikoros Sleuth.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Robert Majzels. Apikoros Sleuth. The Mercury Press, 2005. 55 (folio) pp. Paper: $15.95. If Dashiell Hammett had written the stream-of-consciousness detective novel he once claimed he would like to, and that manuscript had been passed on to...

Roberto Calasso. K.(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Roberto Calasso. K. Trans. Geoffrey Brock. Knopf, 2005. 327 pp. $25.00. This extended commentary on Franz Kafka's fiction is the fourth installment in a brilliant and highly original series of works that render the distinction between...

William T. Vollmann. Europe Central.(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... William T. Vollmann. Europe Central. Viking, 2005. 811 pp. $39.95. Sixteen months after the initial shock of William T. Vollmann's three thousand-plus page nonfiction opus, Rising Up and Rising Down, just as the literary community begins to...

Christopher Sorrentino. Trance.(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Christopher Sorrentino. Trance. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005. 516 pp. $26.00. A little more than twenty years after the fact, the abduction of Patricia Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army is an event whose assumption into the realm...

David Ohle. The Age of Sinatra.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... David Ohle. The Age of Sinatra. Soft Skull, 2004. 168 pp. Paper: $11.95. David Ohle's new book begins on "the Sinatra-age pleasure ship Titanic," and so establishes from the start an anachronistic universe that looks both backward with...

Yuri Olesha. Envy.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Yuri Olesha. Envy. Trans. Marian Schwartz. Intro. Ken Kalfus. New York Review Books, 2004. 152 pp. Paper: $12.95. This is a new English translation of a novella by Yuri Olesha (1899-1960) originally published in Russian in 1927. A welcome...

Sandor Marai. Casanova in Bolzano.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Sandor Marai. Casanova in Bolzano. Trans. by George Szirtes. Knopf, 2004. 204 pp. $22.00. In Marai's striking incarnation, the legendary lover appears as a sleeping wonder whose mere presence frightens and bewitches the village of Bolzano....

Blaise Cendrars. Gold: The Marvellous History of General John Augustus Sutter.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Blaise Cendrars. Gold: The Marvellous History of General John Augustus Sutter. Trans. Nina Rootes. Peter Owen, 2003. 128 pp. Paper: $18.95. (Reprint) Gold is Blaise Cendrars's leanest novel, written mainly in brief lines and compact...

Antoine Volodine. Minor Angels.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Antoine Volodine. Minor Angels. Trans. and preface Jordan Stump. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2004. 166 pp. $25.00. The Young Marble Giants song "Final Day" could serve as Minor Angels's soundtrack: a single sci-fi theremin note hovers over a...

Igor Klekh. A Land the Size of Binoculars.(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Igor Klekh. A Land the Size of Binoculars. Trans. Michael M. Naydan and Slava I. Yastremski. Intro. Andrei Bitov. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2004. 216 pp. Paper: $18.95. A Land the Size of Binoculars is the first batch of Igor Klekh's...

Blaise Cendrars. The Astonished Man.(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Blaise Cendrars. The Astonished Man. Trans. Nina Rootes. Peter Owen, 2004. 260 pp. Paper: $22.95. (Reprint) The modernist memoir is compulsively prone to fabrication, but in this respect Cendrars is in a class of his own. The Astonished Man...

Witold Gombrowicz. A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes.(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Witold Gombrowicz. A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes. Trans. by Bill Johnston. Yale Univ. Press, 2004. 128 pp. $22.00; Polish Memories. Trans. by Bill Johnston. Yale Univ. Press, 2004. 208 pp. $24.00. These two short...

Uwe Johnson. A Trip to Klagenfurt: In the Footsteps of Ingeborg Bachmann.(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Uwe Johnson. A Trip to Klagenfurt: In the Footsteps of Ingeborg Bachmann. Trans. Damion Searls. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2004. 92 pp. Paper: $19.95 Days after Ingeborg Bachmann's death, Uwe Johnson travels to her gravesite in her hometown...

Thomas DePietro, ed. Conversations with Don DeLillo.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2005... Thomas DePietro, ed. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2004. xiv + 183 pp. Cloth: $50.00; Paper $20.00. This latest volume in the Mississippi Literary Conversations series collects seventeen interviews with Don...

Books received.
June 22, 2005... Ali, Tariq. A Sultan in Palermo. Verso Books, 2005. $24.00. (F) Allemand, Roger-Michel and Christian Milat. Le Nouveau Roman en Questions 5: Une "Nouvelle Autobiographie"? Lettres Modernes Minard, 2004. Paper: 25.00 [euro]. (NF) ...