The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from March 1993

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from March 1993

Back to basics. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... In a pinch, you can always say GP, but you will find no way of naming him fully in a situation such as this. Still, calling to mind many various ways in which words found distinction at his hands, I think it is not unfitting to discuss him in...

The old and the new: an introduction to Georges Perec. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... Georges Perec was born in Paris on 7 March 1936, and died of cancer on 3 March 1982. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland, and his first background was Belleville, a working-class quarter to the east of central Paris. Perec's father...

Georges Perec owns up. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau) (Interview)
March 22, 1993... Q: Things? It's a puzzling title, easily misunderstood. Haven't you really written a book not about things, but about happiness? GP: That's because there's a necessary connection, to my mind, between modern things and happiness. The...

Statement of intent. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... When I attempt to state what I have tried to do as a writer since I began, what occurs to me first of all is that I have never written two books of the same kind, nor ever wanted to reuse a formula, or a system, or an approach already developed...

The doing of fiction. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau) (Interview)
March 22, 1993... GP: I began writing, I was twenty about. I am now forty-five and I think I learn how to write. I know how to write stories and even poetry and dramas, I could say, and it's my way of living in a sense. I can't imagine a life in which I won't...

81 easy-cook recipes for beginners. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... Sole aux champignons: Take two fine whole fresh sole, skin and fillet them. Bake in a medium oven for 40', basting frequently. When half done, add half a pound of button mushrooms. Lay out on a heated serving dish and sprinkle generously with...

From "53 Days." (autobiography) (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... 15 May The army and the police are still patrolling the city. Ten days ago, for the twentieth anniversary of Independence, the miners of Cularo held a rally in Avenue de la Presidence-a-vie that left eight dead, amongst them a woman...

Phago-citations: Barthes, Perec, and the transformation of literature. (Roland Barthes) (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead...

Perec's Jewishness. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... Georges Perec's "History of the Lipogram" begins with references to the Zohar, to Rabbi Simeon, to the cabala, and to the three main directions of cabalistic exegesis: gematry, notarikon, and temurah. This majestic demonstration of learning...

'W or The Memory of Childhood.' (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... W or the memory of childhood is a book that only works on the reader's sufferance: it's a kind of torture: a complex machine that makes its reader turn the handle to arrive at something unbearable, a truth which is never said, yet which has to...

The eleventh day: Perec and the infra-ordinary. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... The word itself is a modest enough neologism, easily decipherable as the reverse, or the negative, of "extraordinary," but what in effect did Georges Perec mean by l'infra-ordinaire? In Approches de quoi? (Approaches to What?), a brief text...

The transition from W to M in 'Life a User's Manual.' (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... The "classic" palindrome is a great deal different, because in each direction its component letters and signs are identical, although such a symmetry does not of course make them (all) invariable. Only in the sequence does a true symmetry...

Transformations of constraint. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... Let us start with two autobiographical fragments, from W or The Memo of Childhood: As for me, I would have liked to help my mother clear the dinner from the kitchen table. There would have been a blue, small-checked oilcloth on the table,...

Perec's painterly eye. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... "Between Correggio's Anch'io son pittore and Poussin's J'apprends a regarder lie the fragile borderlines of the narrow field in which all creation takes place, and where ultimate development can only be Silence, that self-willed,...

Appendix. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau) (Bibliography)
March 22, 1993... Perec in English 1. There are three pieces by Perec which exist in English - kinds of English - without their having a French "original": 1.1. "Experimental Demonstration of the Tomatotopic Organization in the Soprano (Cantatrix...

Felipe Alfau: curriculum vitae. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... Welcome to the paradigmatic, proto-postmodernist universe of Felipe Alfau in which, unknowingly, Julio Cortizar, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec have found an inspiration. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T. S. Eliot claims that no...

Anonymity: an interview with Felipe Alfau. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau) (Interview)
March 22, 1993... A man's life is like those geographical fragments with which children learn "the contiguous countries." The pieces are a puzzle; but put them together carefully, and lo! they are a map. IS: Why did you become a writer? FA: I am not...

The triumph of the exception. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... As I begin writing these notes, in early summer 1991, I think Felipe Alfau is alive, although I must confess it's a strange thought, colored by a certain surprise and ambiguous disbelief acquired from the confessions - if one could call them...

The return of the native. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... In may of 1958, my husband Daniel and I and our two daughters, Nina, age three, and Emily, seven months old, provisioned with seven cartons of Beech Nut Baby Food, boarded the SS Guadalupe from Pier 21 in Manhattan. That morning, Dan and I had...

Two or three things I know about him. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... Extracts from a conversation with Ilan Stavans in a Polish restaurant on Manhattan's Lower East Side, 6 July 1991 He was born in nineteenth-century Spain, and I think his father was an internal governor of provinces in the Philippines. He...

Hidalgo redeemed. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... Once or twice in life, if luck is working in manifold ways, you get a second chance. Felipe Alfau, someone important and Spanish, older, a star in our circle, got lost from us and disappeared into our unassuageable memories in the early...

Sixty-one years of solitude. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... In 1928, Felipe Alfau, a twenty-six-year-old Spaniard living in New York, wrote a slim novel, in English, called Locos: A Comedy of Gestures. He had trouble finding a publisher for it, and when the book finally came out, in 1936, it was in a...

Aliens, aliases, and alibis: Alfau's 'Locos' as a metaphysical detective story. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... 1. Aliens Along with Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Flann O'Brien, and other experimental writers of the twenties, thirties, and forties, Felipe Alfau invented what we now call "postmodernism." Alfau, Borges, Nabokov, O'Brien:...

Pirandello and Alfau. (Luigi Pirandello) (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... Although Luigi Pirandello began to write in his adolescent years, the numerous works he published until his fifties did not earn him much recognition. Only with the success of the first staging of Six Characters in Search of an Author on 10 May...

The power of 'Chromos.' (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... When the Casa Moneo, a general store on 14th Street in New York, closed down a few years back, one of the last centers of the Peninsular Spanish colony in the city disappeared. Today this relatively small and little-known ethnic group, with...

Literature is corny: the cursi and Felipe Alfau's 'Chromos.' (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... In both Locos and Chromos the narrator presents himself with very little desire to narrate anything. In the first novel the prologue blames the characters for most of the narrative decisions and the author expresses his resentment toward their...

Truth or Temptation? Don Pedro's refutation of time in 'Chromos.' (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... About two-thirds of the way through Felipe Alfau's second novel, Chromos, Don Pedro takes the protagonist, along with the novelist Garcia, Dr. de los Rios, and Senior Olozaga to his apartment in the East Sixties and launches into an unexpected...

Felipe Alfau and the NBA. (National Book Award) (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... When asked in the spring of 1990 if I would serve as a fiction judge for the National Book Award, I accepted straightaway. Asked to propose another name, I gave that of William Gass, who also accepted. Stylists rarely get a chance to judge...

Recalled to life. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... Although I didn't originally plan to contribute to this issue, my name and that of Dalkey Archive come up often enough that a short note clarifying our part in rediscovering and publishing Alfau seems warranted to set the record straight. ...

Felipe Alfau: a bibliography. (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau) (Bibliography)
March 22, 1993... 1. Books by Felipe Alfau Old Talesfrom Spain a. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Doran, 1929 Locos. A Comedy of Gestures a. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936 b. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1988; afterword by Mary ...

Divina Trace.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... !Ay Dios mio shitong! Which is to say that my heart sank when I received Divina Trace-first because on the dust jacket George Plimpton described its author as the Caribbean James Joyce, and then because a quick flip through the book revealed both...

Love's Mansion.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Paul West's newest novel is ostensibly a memoir of his parents in novel form, but it boasts a postmodern dimension that adds to its appeal. The first paragraph sweetly introduces the heroine of the novel as a young girl, but the second...

Eve's Longing: The Infinite Possibilities in All Things.
March 22, 1993... Not many words are wasted in this slender first novel, which enacts the downward spiral of its uniquely disturbed and disturbing central character, Eve. The "downward spiral" is one of Eve's preoccupations, as she dreams and also experiences...

The Idea of Home.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... A novel of the American landscape by the author of Metaphysics in the Midwest. The sensibility is the same and uniquely recognizable - philosophic background veering from apple-pie Americana to perverse and raunchy sex to Weather People...

The Book of Embraces.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... The skills of a historian, journalist, prose-poet, and old-fashioned storyteller are combined in Galeano's work. He constructs this book of anecdotes in a mosaic or montage-like fashion, never completely filling a page with text, using some of...

The Presence of Things Past.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Taylor uses as his title an ambiguous phrase from Saint Augustine. It suggests that time is mysterious, uncanny, incomprehensible. When we go through our daily motions, we suddenly but dimly remember events that occurred years ago; we lose our...

Blues for a Black Cat and Other Stories.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... The prolific and versatile French writer Boris Vian cut a rambunctious figure on the Paris intellectual scene of the '40s and '50s. A novelist, playwright, translator, and famous literary prankster, Vian lived only the meagerest sliver of a...

The Stories of John Edgar Wideman.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Fever (1989) and Dumballah (1981), two previously published collections of stories by John Edgar Wideman, are bound together here with ten new stories entitled All Stories Are True. These new stories alone are worth the price of this volume....

Bitches Ride Alone.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Because I want to be a bitch, I was immediately drawn to Laura Chester's new short-story collection, Bitches Ride Alone, with a sassy cover shot of a woman on horseback and the promise of cool Western breezes, a respite from my life as a...

The Song of Percival Peacock.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... The first pages of this brilliant novel suggest that it concerns law, order, "mastery." Mr. Peacock believes that these abstractions exist, that they cannot be destroyed. He expects that he will inherit completely his dead father's estate; he...

Night Roamers and Other Stories.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... You can't take the Nobel Prize, or, for that matter, any prize given to artists, very seriously; after all, James Joyce did not win a Nobel but Pearl Buck did. Beyond that, any halfway decent Scandinavian author has a better shot at winning the...

Aerea in the Forests of Manhattan.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... With the publication of Emmanuel Hocquard's Aerea in the Forests of Manhattan, the Marlboro Press has again succeeded in making available in this country a work that must be read. Hocquard is a powerful and immensely talented writer who has...

Miss Knight and Others.
March 22, 1993... Ezra Pound gave us the definitive "haiku" to express just the right rage in response to the Great War: "There died a myriad,/ And of the best, among them,/ For an old bitch gone in the teeth,/ For a botched civilization." Not the Roaring...

Qwert and the Wedding Gown.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Born in 1931, Matias Montes Huidobro, a prolific Cuban poet, essayist, and novelist now living in Hawaii, left his native country as a result of Fidel Castro's revolution. While his career includes a number of theater pieces, poetry, and...

Fathers and Crows.
March 22, 1993... Towards the end of William T. Vollmann's The Ice-Shirt - the first of seven installments in his "symbolic history" of North America, Seven Dreams - the Micmac Indian chief Carrying the War-Club picks up an iron ax left by a dead Norseman, and,...

A Case of Curiosities.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... I once had an article returned to me by an editor who said that he'd found it "curiously eighteenth-century." The same might be said of Allen Kurzweil's remarkable first novel, A Case of Curiosities, and I hope he will, as I did, take that as a...

The Color of the Snow.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... This is one of the most brilliant novels I have read recently. At first it appears to be merely a series of odd stories, a film scenario, a poetic essay on the differences between spoken and written words. In this "series" - the word is perhaps...

Thinking About Magritte.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Cities thrill me, not least of all Limestone, the fine city in Kate Sterns's first novel, Thinking about Magritte. Here all the official buildings - mental hospital, prisons, university - look identical, and it is not unusual to see...

Fables of the Irish Intelligentsia.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... At the beginning of "The Missionary," the second and the best story in Fitzpatrick's debut collection, the following gem appears: "Father Boniface, you're a real shit,' said the Abbot of Petra Fertilis." It is clear from this hilarious and...

A Guide for the Perplexed.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Although Levi gives the reader a first novel, he refuses to write about the trials of youth, the thinly disguised fictional memoir - The Catcher in the Rye for example. He is brave and experimental; he offers a complex, postmodern novel about...

Farabeuf.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Farabeuf centers on a torture practice known as the leng tche in which the victim is literally cut to pieces while still alive. In 1905 Louis Carpeaux, while in China, photographed the torture of Fu-Chu Li (1880-1905), punished for killing a...

Public Landing Revisited.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... This collection of fourteen stories and a prologue is about a fictional town, Public Landing, located "on Old Route 13, a few miles west of The Dual [a highway consisting 'of two dual lanes of slab cement separated by crabgrass in the middle'],...

Not the Swiss Family Robinson.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... There are two concurrent movements in this novel, one that takes its narrator, Monica Robinson, away from all that she discovers she is not, the other drawing her towards whatever she has the potential to be. The title of Cooper's fourth novel...

Where Does the Kissing End?
March 22, 1993... In her first book, a collection of exceptionally well-crafted and quietly offcenter short fiction called Tiny Lies (1988), Kate Pullinger, a Canadian living in London since 1982, explored the worlds of marginally employed women learning to tell...

The witch of Amboto. (Three Old Tales from Spain) (short story) (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... Near Guernica, a village of the Basque Provinces in Spain, there is a place known by the name of Amboto. On winter nights strange tales are told about this place: tales accompanied by the appetizing bubbling of the moroquil which cooks on the...

The clover. (Three Old Tales from Spain) (short story) (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... The Clover A cojer el trebol, el trebol el trebol, A cojer el trebol la Noche de San Juan. It is the night of San Juan in Spain! The night of bonfires and clover hunters. One can hear this song repeated by young and old as they go...

The rainbow. (Three Old Tales from Spain) (short story) (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... The Rainbow One day the peaceful village of N - was aroused by a strange visitor. He walked through the main street as one who owns the world: an air which contrasted decidedly with his appearance. He was of good height and build....

From 'Powdered Eggs.' (excerpt) (Georges Perec/Felipe Alfau)
March 22, 1993... One could not know Felipe Alfau, be a novelist, and not write about him. Another friend of mine, the late, splendid Anatole Broyard, had the same qualities and turned up, I would guess, in a score of books. But Anatole ran with writers. Felipe...

Watching TV with the Red Chinese.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Three Chinese students - Wa, Chen, and Tzu - arrive in Cleveland in late 1980 to study SSM: Systems Science and Mathematics. Their neighbor across the hall, Dexter Mitchell, or Mitch, becomes their guide through the complexities of contemporary...

Ruin.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Beppe Fenoglio has written possibly the most beautiful and at the same time the saddest novel I have ever read. The language is simple and the story moves along very quickly to an end that promises nothing for the characters Fenoglio has...

Larabi's Ox: Stories of Morocco.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... This year's winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize joins the growing ranks of novel/short story hybrids. Ardizzone weaves three distinct story lines in Larabi's Ox, all involving Americans hoping to distract themselves from stateside...

The Continual Pilgrimage: American Writers in Paris, 1944-1960.
March 22, 1993... The Continual Pilgrimage is an account of American writers in Paris between 1944 and 1960 presented in a series of vignettes. It begins with two contrasting icons, residents of prewar Paris: Hemingway, the obnoxious jealous revenant lurcher at...

The Cat Inside.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Although at first glance The Cat Inside looks like a cute little book about kitties, closer inspection will find Burroughs's celebrated irony, gallows humor, apocalyptic fears, brutal lyricism, and mythological interests. In these brief...

My Silk Purse and Yours: The Publishing Scene and American Literary Art.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Garrett uses as an epigraph these lines from Joyce Cary's preface to the Carfax edition of The Horse's Mouth: "He is himself a creator, and he has lived in creation all his life, and so he understands and continually reminds himself that in a...

Celine: A Biography.
March 22, 1993... Louis-Ferdinand Celine was a madman who thought he was Louis-Ferdinand Celine. What more conclusive a way to capture simultaneously the life and literary contributions of the twentieth century's most gifted misanthrope than by paraphrasing...

Sky: Memoirs.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... It looks like Cendrars might be about to get the credit he deserves as a major modernist. During the nineteen-teens, he along with his pal Guillaume Apollinaire were among the major French experimental poets. Some called them cubists of the...

Language Unbound: On Experimental Writing by Women.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... This book begins with an assertion: "In Western patriarchal culture, good women are silent, bad women speak falsely and no woman has a language of her own." It is the challenge then, Nancy Gray contends, of experimental writing by women to free...

Manuscripts Don't Burn: A Life in Letters and Diaries.
March 22, 1993... It appears that Bulgakov is among the most popular of the early Soviet writers, not only owing to his literary importance, which is considerable, but because of his fascinating and tragic life. The son of a professor of comparative religion at...

Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... This collection of interviews with ten distinguished contemporary Latin American women writers is intended as an introduction for the English-speaking public. The interviews, conducted in 1983 in New York, Washington, D.C., and Mexico City,...

Double Agent: The Critic and Society.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... Morris Dickstein, the author of a brilliant book on the cultural climate of the 1960s entitled Gates of Eden, is always provocative, sane, and forceful. In his new book he offers an analysis of "the critic and society." His preface raises the...

Looking for Genet: Literary Essays and Reviews.
March 22, 1993... Alfred Chester (1928-1971) is a fine and unjustly forgotten fiction writer, but his nonfiction work - essays, reviews, letters - could be just as amusing and poignant. Chester had a reputation for being a "meshuggener" (crazy man). Certainly he...

L'Enfant meduse.
March 22, 1993... L'Enfant meduse (The Child Medusa) made me go back and reread Germain's previous novel Jours de colere (Days of Anger), winner of France's 1989 Femina Prize. The rereading confirmed what I had suspected about Germain - that she is one of those...

Les Faux-fuyants.
March 22, 1993... L'Enfant meduse (The Child Medusa) made me go back and reread Germain's previous novel Jours de colere (Days of Anger), winner of France's 1989 Femina Prize. The rereading confirmed what I had suspected about Germain - that she is one of those...

Au peril de la mer.
March 22, 1993... L'Enfant meduse (The Child Medusa) made me go back and reread Germain's previous novel Jours de colere (Days of Anger), winner of France's 1989 Femina Prize. The rereading confirmed what I had suspected about Germain - that she is one of those...

Zla kob zaborava.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1993... One hundred and forty-three pocket-sized glossy pages between color-photo covers tell the story of the ninety-three day blockade of the medieval city of Dubrovnik by irregular forces as the Yugoslav National Army stood by. The story, in...

A Map of "Mexico City Blues": Jack Kerouac as Poet.
March 22, 1993... We rarely review poetry books in these pages, much less critical studies of poetry, but this one deserves special notice. Although Kerouac has been the subject of a good deal of amateur criticism ("amateur" in its best, etymological sense),...

Sex, Art, and American Culture.
March 22, 1993... "I'm an Annie Oakley figure," she told People magazine. "With reporters... I'm in my element, like Roz Russell in His Girl Friday, a boisterous, wise-cracking, machine-gun American verbal style." "Most women aren't willing to rupture the...