The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from June 2006

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from June 2006

"Dancing past the ultimate arrow": an overview of William Eastlake's life and works.(Biography)
June 22, 2006... Biography Home for William Eastlake was the high desert Southwest, first of New Mexico, then of the Old Mexico borderland in Arizona, the "undiscovered country" he made his own. Why? Here's how he told it (in 1975): My original...

Julieta Campos and the repeating island.(Critical essay)
June 22, 2006... "Para las almas, la muerte consiste en volverse agua." (For the soul, death consists in returning to water.)--Heraclito de efeso, Epigraph to Julieta Campos's Muerte por agua (Death by Water), 1965 "Words have this advantage over brick and...

Jane Bowles.(Biography)
June 22, 2006... Early in Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles's first and only novel, the reader learns that Christina Goering "was in the habit of going through mental struggles--generally of a religious nature--and she preferred to be with other people and...

Jean Echenoz. Ravel.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Jean Echenoz. Ravel. Minuit, 2006. 124 pp. Paper: 12.00 [euro]. Since the beginning of his career in the late 1970s, Jean Echenoz has borrowed freely from popular genres--detective fiction, espionage, the adventure novel--in his efforts to...

Juan Goytisolo. A Cock-Eyed Comedy.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Juan Goytisolo. A Cock-Eyed Comedy. Trans. Peter Bush. City Lights, 2005. 173 pp. Paper: $13.95. Juan Goytisolo's A Cock-Eyed Comedy is a picaresque hash of world history, Spanish culture, and religious orthodoxy. Beginning with the...

Mircea Cartarescu. Nostalgia.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Mircea Cartarescu. Nostalgia. Trans. and afterword Julian Semilian. Intro. Andrei Codrescu. New Directions, 2005. 322 pp. Paper: $19.95. The red-tinted photograph on the cover of Nostalgia shows a gargoyle with the words "A NOVEL" printed...

Gilbert Sorrentino. A Strange Commonplace.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Gilbert Sorrentino. A Strange Commonplace. Coffee House, 2006. 154 pp. Paper: $14.95. Sorrentino had a shtick, always had the same shtick, a simple and wonderful shtick that is almost impossible to reproduce. He made it look effortless,...

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. Chinese Sun.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. Chinese Sun. Trans. Evgeny Pavlov. Ugly Duckling, 2005. 326 pages. Paper: $15.00. Chinese Sun is neither a novel nor a poem, but it contains, almost symmetrically, the elements of both. It resembles fiction with...

Stephen Wright. The Amalgamation Polka.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Stephen Wright. The Amalgamation Polka. Knopf, 2006. 323 pp. $24.95. Stephen Wright's provocative Civil War novel chronicles the picaresque life and adventures of Liberty Fish, the devoted son of ardent abolitionists and the grandson of...

Dubravka Ugresic. The Ministry of Pain.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Dubravka Ugresic. The Ministry of Pain. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. Ecco, 2005. 272 pp. $22.95 Like Kafka's harrow, the conflict at the heart of Dubravka Ugresic's The Ministry of Pain incises the ordeal of exile on her Croatian...

Kellie Wells. Skin.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Kellie Wells. Skin. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2006. 243 pp. $27.95. Wells gives us a series of linked stories with a prologue and epilogue. Although the setting is the small town of What Cheer, Kansas, the citizens of that town not only do...

Javier Marias. Written Lives.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Javier Marias. Written Lives. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. New Directions, 2006. 192 pp. $22.95. There's a theory--possibly long-since discredited--that we big-brained, antisocial primates use gossip as an alternative to grooming; that...

Jenny Erpenbeck. The Old Child & Other Stories.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Jenny Erpenbeck. The Old Child & Other Stories. Trans. Susan Bernofsky. New Directions, 2005. 120 pp. Paper: $14.95. Jenny Erpenbeck is attuned to the ways in which life is defined by entropy; her characters are ill, demented, suicidal,...

Leonid Dobychin. Encounters with Lise and Other Stories.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Leonid Dobychin. Encounters with Lise and Other Stories. Trans. Richard C. Borden with Natalia Belova. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2005. 192 pp. Paper: $16.95. In 1936, Leonid Dobychin, a fiction writer of uncommon gifts, went missing the...

George Garrett. Empty Bed Blues.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... George Garrett. Empty Bed Blues. Univ. of Missouri Press, 2006. 179 pp. Paper: $19.95. Third-person is perhaps the point of view most often employed in metafiction, but first-person, as George Garrett shows us in this remarkable collection...

Kathryn Davis. The Thin Place.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Kathryn Davis. The Thin Place. Little, Brown, 2006. 288 pp. $23.95. It's always seemed that critics don't know exactly what to do with Kathryn Davis... how to place her. Her novels--The Thin Place is number six--have always existed in an...

Paule Constant. White Spirit.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Paule Constant. White Spirit. Trans. Betsy Wing. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2005. 172 pp. Paper: $19.95. Originally published in France in 1989, this is one of three Paule Constant novels that Betsy Wing has translated for Nebraska's...

Hans Bellmer. The Doll.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Hans Bellmer. The Doll. Trans. and intro. Malcolm Green, with Antony Melville. Atlas, 2005. 154 pp. Paper: 20.00 [pounds sterling]. We all have our lists of small publishers that are candidates for their own kind of sainthood, and England's...

Diamela Eltit. Custody of the Eyes.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Diamela Eltit. Custody of the Eyes. Trans. Helen Lane and Ronald Christ. Lumen Books, 2005. 104 pp. Paper: $17.00. The need for security demands surveillance, and in a world increasingly uncertain, there can never be enough surveillance. We...

Olivier Cadiot. Colonel Zoo.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Olivier Cadiot. Colonel Zoo. Trans. Cole Swensen. Green Integer, 2006. 202 pp. Paper: $11.95. It's difficult to determine what's happening in Colonel Zoo, due to the fact that the narrator, a butler whose name may be John Robinson, is in...

Kass Fleisher. Accidental Species.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Kass Fleisher. Accidental Species. Chax Press, 2005. 110 pp. Paper: $16.00. Accidental Species "is not for the squamous." Fleisher has written a fiction that reaches for the edges of the postmodern experiment where all experience unites in...

Stanley Crawford. Petroleum Man.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Stanley Crawford. Petroleum Man. Overlook, 2005. 238 pages. $23.95. In the tradition of Gaddis's prepubescent entrepreneur and Elkin's aging franchiser, the billionaire narrator of Stanley Crawford's Petroleum Man is in thrall to the...