The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from March 1994

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from March 1994

How do you introduce Paul Auster in three minutes? (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... Delivered at a public reading by Auster and Don DeLillo, 92nd Street Y, New York, NY, November 1990 If your weakness is high-stakes poker, and if you find yourself in a smoky Manhattan apartment at 11:00 P.M. as three games are...

From 'Mr. Vertigo.' (excerpt) (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... When spring rolled around for the second time, the farm work was like a holiday to me, and I threw myself into it with manic good cheer, welcoming the chance to live like a normal person again. Instead of lagging behind and grousing about my...

The Auster instance: a ficto-biography. (author Paul Auster) (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... WITH A (let us call him A, since he insists) in the rare and vulnerable position of being "done," we have the unanticipated opportunity of simple speech. We can compare notes. Not in order to clear the air. No, the air is what we'd like at last...

Paul Auster: 'The Invention of Solitude.' (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... Impossible, I realize, to enter another's solitude. --Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (New York: SUN, 1982), 19. The thing happens for a second time, says Paul Auster, and that is memory. In our collective...

Auster's memory. (Paul Auster) (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... Memory is out of Fashion these days. To speak of the election of 1992 is seemingly to speak nostalgically. There are, however, some small strokes against the tidal wave of the Orwellian ever present that Baudrillard and Jameson have made a sort...

Austerities. (interpretation of Paul Auster's writings) (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... For poetry cannot save the soul or retrieve a lost world. It simply asserts the given. --Paul Auster, "The Poetry of Exile" I have been thinking of the various books for weeks, having wanted to make clear a sense of their...

The bureau of missing persons: notes on Paul Auster's fiction. (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... I have a friend who lives across town who fears that she is losing, not her mind, exactly, but her identity. This began about three months ago. Various foods she had once loved made her sick. Panic states like waves of fever confounded her with...

Paul Auster: some 'elective affinities.' (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... In many portraits of great solitaries (like Saint Jerome) the figures are often surrounded by bones scattered in the deserts or by death's heads. In Paul Auster's work the scenario of possibility is often reversed: the characters themselves...

From one mirror to another: the rhetoric of disaffiliation in 'City of Glass.' (interpretation of Paul auster's novel) (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... All texts essentially dislodge other texts. --Edward Said (45) If it is true that City of Glass contains the classical scaffolding of a detective novel, with its cerebral gumshoe, rich victim, sexy nurse turned mistress (which...

The strange case of Paul Auster. (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... THE MYSTERY IS THIS: How can we best classify the works of Paul Auster? Exhibit I is a statement he makes about one of his characters: "What interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to...

A book at the end of the world: Paul Auster's 'In the Country of Last Things.' (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... TRANSPARENT, STRAIGHTFORWARD as speech, and almost entirely innocent of the formal conundrums and cross-referenced allusions for which his New York Trilogy is noted, Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things would appear at first glance to...

Reality, fiction and 'In the Country of Last Things.' (analysis of Paul Auster's novel) (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... At the end of The Locked Room, the final volume of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, the narrator travels to Boston to track down the disappeared novelist, Fanshawe. He makes his way across the city on foot, arriving finally at a certain street,...

Inside 'Moon Palace.' (analysis of Paul Auster's novel) (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... In the 1960s it was obvious, to the point of appearing to be "the natural order," that language was with the people. Not so. The people it turned out were infinitely more unsettled than originally supposed. They were...

Inventing 'The Music of Chance.' (analysis of Paul Auster's novel) (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... As Human Beings, our relationship with truth and chance seems a paradoxical one. Where truth exists, the elements of chance decrease. For truth is a narrowing of boundaries and options. Yet perhaps, in the most extreme conditions, it is...

The currents of fate and 'The Music of Chance.' (analysis of Paul Auster's novel) (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... Paul Auster's characters have a penchant for throwing themselves into the hands of fate, not always with the happiest of results. In City of Glass the detective, Quinn, wishing to be true to the letter of his assignment, decides to take up...

Phantoms of liberty: the secret lives of 'Leviathan.' (analysis of novel by Paul Auster) (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... "By art," writes Hobbes, "is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH or STATE... which is but an artificial man" (23), a "multitude unified in one person" (142). United by their "pacts and covenants" (23), individuals elect to...

Publishing Paul Auster. (includes bibliography) (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... In the age of xerography the arrival of a manuscript in an editor's mail is not a particularly notable occasion. There is always heavy daily traffic through that "In" box (and "Out"). For all that, I still retain a distinct impression of my...

An interview with Danilo Kis. (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... I met Danilo Kis for the first time at his Paris apartment on the day of our interview--a cool, ov afternoon in May 1984. Kis hadn't been part of my original business in France. On the flight over from New York I had run into a writer friend...

Autobiographical sketch (short autobiography). (excerpt from 'Mansarda') (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... My Father first saw the light of day in the western part of Hungary. He completed trade school in the hometown of a certain Mr. Viraga who, thanks to Mr. Joyce, would become the famous Leopold Bloom. I suppose it was because of the liberal...

Journey or conversation. (excerpt from 'Mansarda') (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... My dearest, my one and only. Between our embraces, a light year always passes. You know how much I distrust love letters, but still I must write to you. How could I prove to you my love, when you don't see either my eyes or my skies! I...

Garbage heap (from papers left behind). (poem) (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... I have always been interested in the diversity of things. A long time ago I wrote a poem which was no more than a detailed list of a trash can: a summary of the entire world, the simplest of all resumes: under the remnants of every thing there...

Three essays. (excerpts from 'Homo poeticus') (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... We Are Singing in the Desert(1) 1. I SEE THE POSTWAR development of Serbian prose as a slow movement and as a painful convulsion, as an accidental and sporadic flash of some talented individuals and of some books; and in these...

The text you read (and write) may be your own: the family romance in Danilo Kis's 'Garden, Ashes.' (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... The subject of a brief, four-page essay by Sigmund Freud in 1908, the "family romance" has become recognized as a valuable paradigm for interpreting literary works, especially those which dramatize father-son relationships. The family romance...

Kis's 'Hourglass' and the poetics of possibility. (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... Writings on Danilo Kis's Hourglass often state that the novel is difficult and confusing but that everything will be made clear by a letter at its conclusion which was actually written by the author's father. In these words I hear the...

A Frolic of His Own.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... William Gaddis. Poseidon, 1994. 586 pp. $25-00. Gaddis's magnificent new novel is both cutting-edge, state-of-the-art fiction and a throwback to the great moral novels of Tolstoy and Dickens. That it can be both is just one of the many...

Divine Days.
March 22, 1994... Leon Forrest. Norton/Another Chicago Press, 1993. 1,135 pp. $32.00. Miscegenation and its aftermath, from 1619 to the present, is the major theme of Leon Forrest's compendious novel (1,135 pages), Divine Days. Like other prodigious writers...

'Hourglass' as the scene of writing. (Danilo Kis's novel) (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... Kis and Yugoslav Postmodernism POSTMODERNISM AS A CULTURAL paradigm began to manifest itself in early postwar Yugoslav literature notwithstanding the monolithic structure of the communist state which came into existence at the close of...

Textualizing the past: the function of memory and history in Kis's fiction. (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... Danilo Kis's last two works, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and Encyclopedia of the Dead, were published in the 1970s and the 1980s, times when many writers of fiction and poetry were intensifying their interest in historical themes and in the...

Faction or fiction in 'A Tomb for Boris Davidovich': the literary affair. (criticism of Danilo Kis' novel) (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... No other literary affair in postwar Yugoslav literature has aroused so much interest and passion at home than that of Danilo Kis upon the publication of his novel A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976). The affair dogged Kis for the rest of his...

Danilo Kis in Buenos Aires. (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... There is something you must take seriously! Can't you see that? There is something menacing going on which we don't speak about because we have no words. What sort of damned idyll is it we are clutching on to tooth and...

The unimaginable space of Danilo Kis and Don DeLillo. (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... For the Lord is a God of knowledge. --I Samuel 2:3 Illusions do not play games with those who have seen a dead body arise. --A Tomb for Boris Davidovich(1) A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is a work of political...

"Do you get it now?": humorous dispositions in Danilo Kis and Tadeusz Konwicki. (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... IT IS ALWAYS RISKY BUSINESS to be human, especially in situations governed by oppression, deceit, and deliberately bluffed parameters, such as occurred under the sway of Nazi Germany or Russian communism during their long, dark hegemonies. The...

Danilo Kis: the theatrical connection. (includes bibliography) (Paul Auster/Danilo Kis)
March 22, 1994... Danilo Kis was a man of the theater, even though most of his literary career centered on fiction and essay writing. He was a brilliant translator of several French plays, classical and modern, most notably of Corneille's Cid and Moliere's Don...

Strange Pilgrims.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Gabrial Garcia Marquez. Trans. Edith Grossman. Knopf, 1993. 188 pp. $21.00. These twelve tales set in contemporary Europe, written over the last eighteen years (and rewritten, Marquez tells us in a prologue, in "eight feverish months")...

Little Kingdoms.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Steven Millhauser. Poseidon, 1993. 239 pp. $21.00. This collection of three novellas confirms my belief in the extraordinary talent--genius?--of Millhauser. Although I have reviewed In the Penny Arcade, From the Realm of Morpheus, and The...

Butterfly Stories.
March 22, 1994... William T. Vollmann. Grove/Atlantic, 1993. 281 pp. $21.00; The search for love has rarely been portrayed as joylessly as it is in Butterfly Stories. The unnamed narrator--variously called "the butterfly boy," "the journalist," "the...

The Rifles.
March 22, 1994... William T. Vollman. Grove/Atlantic, Viking, 1994. 411 pp. $22.95 The search for love has rarely been portrayed as joylessly as it is in Butterfly Stories. The unnamed narrator--variously called "the butterfly boy," "the journalist," "the...

My Mother: Demonology.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Kathy Acker. Pantheon, 1993. 268 pp. $22.00. The themes in Kathy Acker's newest book will not surprise followers of her delirious prose. Schizophrenic juxtaposition again organizes her text. A section entitled "Rape by Dad" begins: "In the...

Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... John Hawkes. Simon and Schuster, 1993. 269 pp. $20.00. The hero-narrator of this picaresque autobiography, Sweet William (also called Old Horse and Petrarch), encapsulates his long horse life in the opening paragraph of this equine saga of...

Virtual Light.
March 22, 1994... William Gibson. Bantam, 1993. 325 pp. $21.95. William Gibson stands at the center of the cultural whirlwind called cyberpunk, that recent subset of science fiction intent on commingling the technosphere of cybernetics, cybernauts, and...

In the Palace of the Movie King.
March 22, 1994... Hortense Calisher. Random House, 1994. 426 pp. Calisher has not received the critical attention she deserves because she writes in a complex, distinctive way. Her sentences are twisted, skewed, ambiguous. The declarative questions itself,...

The Fiction of Hortense Calisher.
March 22, 1994... Katherine Snodgrass. Univ. of Delaware Press, 1993. 136 pp. $29.50. Calisher has not received the critical attention she deserves because she writes in a complex, distinctive way. Her sentences are twisted, skewed, ambiguous. The...

The Road to San Giovanni.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Italo Calvino. Trans. Tim Parks. Pantheon, 1993. 150 pp. $19.00. The five stories published here were planned originally as a larger group or series of "memory exercises," according to Esther Calvino, who tells us in her foreword that "I...

The Zebra Storyteller: Collected Stories.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Spencer Holst. Station Hill, 1993. 295 pp. $28.95; paper: $12.95. Spencer Holst has been for three decades a well-known raconteur in NYC literary cafes, and his published work has found approval from writers as different from one another as...

Djbot Baghostus's Run.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Nathaniel Mackey. Sun & Moon, 1993. 204 pp. Paper: $12.95. The plot of this second book of Nathaniel Mackey's From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Come, an ongoing series of fictive musings on jazz, life, love, and art, concerns the...

Shadows.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Osvaldo Soriano. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. Knopf, 1993. 187 pp. $21.00. Soriano's latest novel explores a world of deserted towns and derelicts. A computer programmer leaves a broken-down train in the middle of the Argentine pampa to wander...

Ancestors Maybe.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Elizabeth MacKiernan. Burning Deck, 1993. 160 pp. Paper: $8.00. What if Ronald Firbank, Flann O'Brien, and Richard Brautigan found themselves forced by circumstances to seek employment with one of Hartford, Connecticut's large insurance...

My Horse and Other Stories.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Stacey Levine. Sun & Moon, 1993. 149 pp. Paper: $11.95. By way of its grotesquely surreal images and situations, Stacey Levine's "first collection of short tales" is an intriguing matter-of-fact study of the impossibility of "real"...

Gilbert Green: The Real Right Way to Dress for Spring, A Novel of 1968.
March 22, 1994... Frederick Ted Cascle. McPherson, 1993. 241 pp. Paper: $11.00. Frederick Ted Castle says he wrote this "novel of 1968" during the winter and spring of that year, then spent the next eighteen years "editing." Yet when McPherson first...

The Autobiography of Cassandra: Princess and Prophetess of Troy.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Ursule Molinaro. McPherson, 1992. 112 pp. Paper: $9.00. Cassandra begins her autobiography at that point near her life's end as she approaches the palace of Mycenae where Clytemnestra will murder both her and Agamemnon. Remembering,...

Old Angel Midnight.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Jack Kerouac. Grey Fox, 1993. xii + 67 pp. Paper: $10.00. Access to Kerouac's lesser-known writings was obstructed for years by his widow, who refused to allow any of it to be reprinted. Now that she's gone and Kerouac's estate is in the...

Good Blonde and Others.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Jack Kerouac. Grey Fox, 1993, xiii + 201 pp. Paper: $11.95. Good Blonde & Others collects his nonfiction: magazine articles, introductions, his "Last Word" columns from Escapade, even some sports columns he wrote for the Saint Petersburg...

Henry James' Midnight Song.
March 22, 1994... Carol De Chellis Hill. Poseidon, 1993. 445 pp. $23.00. A series of murders haunts fin de siecle Vienna. Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Edith Wharton, and Carl Jung are among the suspects. The deservedly famous Inspector LeBlanc has been called...

Cannibal Eliot and the Lost Histories of San Francisco.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Hilton Obenzinger. Mercury House, 1993. 239 pp. Paper: $13.00. Obenzinger understands that history is fiction. He knows that "the past"--of San Francisco, of the United States--is an inadequate, limited representation of the way things...

Enemy Clothing.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Cydney Chadwick. Five Fingers Press, 1993. 114 pp. Paper: $9.95. In her first book of stories, Enemy Clothing, Cydney Chadwick offers a minimalist's semiotics of nineties' heterosexual relationships. The title story exemplifies the...

Chimney Rock.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Charlie Smith. Holt, 1993. $22.50. There have been many novels set in Hollywood, but not many truly literary ones. Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished The Last Tycoon, and Christopher Isherwood's Prater...

Glimpses.
March 22, 1994... Lewis Shiner. Morrow, 1993. 331 pp. $21.00. Ray Shackleford, a stereo repairman in his late thirties, is part of the new lost generation trying in the glum commodified eighties to make some sense of the bright complex sixties, the decade...

The Man Who Would Be God.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Paul Ruffin. Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1993. 155 pp. Paper: $11.00. Although these stories seem to be simple narratives of hard life in Texas, they are, in fact, visionary parables. The title points to the odd, religious qualities of...

Simple Passion.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Annie Ernaux. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993. 64 pp. $15.00. The autobiographical journey of French writer Annie Ernaux began in 1974 with Cleaned Out, and with each succeeding book Ernaux's style has become sparer, more polished, more...

Learning to Dance and Other Stories.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Sharon Oard Warner. New Rivers Press, 1992. 170 pp. Paper: $7.95. For over a decade, the Minnesota Voices Project has been mapping the Midwest with a series of fiction and poetry collections. If anything, the project has amply demonstrated...

The Alphabet Man.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Richard Grossman. Fiction Collective Two and Illinois State University, 1993. 443 pp. Cloth: $22.95; paper: $11.95. In this very dark, very daring first novel by Richard Grossman, words are the only palpable reality. The dense texture of...

Our Secret's out.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Darrell Spencer. Univ. of Missouri Press, 1993. 160 pp. $19.95. The secret that is out, the characters in the title story conclude, is that we are all of us asses. We blurt out idiot things that we should hold in. We hold in what we really...

Two by Duras.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Marguerite Duras. Translated by Alberto Manguel. Coach House Press, 1993. 96 pp. Paper: $7.95. Though called novellas by the publisher, the Two short pieces are more properly called "writings" by Duras in the interview with Ana Maria Moix...

Yann Andrea Steiner.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Marguerite Duras. Marilyn R. Schuster. Twayne, 1993. xxxiv + 185 pp. No price given. Though called novellas by the publisher, the Two short pieces are more properly called "writings" by Duras in the interview with Ana Maria Moix that...

Marguerite Duras Revisited.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Marguerite Duras. Trans. Barbara Bray. Scribner's, 1993. 115 pp. $16.00. Though called novellas by the publisher, the Two short pieces are more properly called "writings" by Duras in the interview with Ana Maria Moix that follows them....

There Is No Borges.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Gerhard Kopf. Trans. Leslie Willson. George Braziller, 1993. 196 pp. $18.50. "Don't make me laugh," barks a waggish Argentine when the narrator of this novel suggests that, just maybe, there was a Borges. What if Borges's greatest...

Bill et Bela.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Alexis Salatko. Presses de la Renaissance, 1993. 168 pp. 85 Fr. Perhaps one must live in the French port of Cherbourg, as does the writer Alexis Salatko, to imagine bringing together William Faulkner and Bela Bartok into an unusual...

Aller a Elisabethville.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Jacques Reda. Gallimard, 1993. 112 pp. 80 Fr. Jacques Reda's subtle autobiographical novel or "essay," Alleri Elisabethville, offers a perspective on the German occupation of France which distinguishes it from countless other fictional...

Georges Perec: A Life in Words.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... David Bellos. A Life in Words. Godine, 1993. 832 pp. $45.00. Perec is one of those writers--like Poe, Borges, and Nabokov--whose life remains enigmatic. We want to know more about it; at the same time, we are dazzled by the singular texts...

William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible.
March 22, 1994... Barry Miles. Hyperion, 1993. 263 pp. $22.95. Barry Miles manages here what all successful biographers must: he assists in the better understanding of and encourages an interest in his subject. Miles is, however, a better biographer than...

Letters: 1945-1959.
March 22, 1994... William Burroughs. Ed. Oliver Harris. Viking, 1993. xi + 472 pp. $25.00. If one has any regrets about this rich and varied selection from the correspondence of one of the most enthralling personalities in American literature, it is that...

Genet: A Biography.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Edmund White. Knopf, 1993. 728 pp. $35.00. Lucky is the novelist who draws a fellow novelist to write his or her biography. The result may be mundane (Henry James on Hawthorne) or outrageous (Brigid Brophy on Firbank), but at least the...

The Novel in the Balance.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Arthur M. Saltzman. Univ. of South Carolina, 1993. x + 188 pp. $29.95. Any book that discusses Alf MacLochlainn's miniature masterpiece Out of Focus (1977) immediately recommends itself. Add to that treatments of under-discussed works like...

Life Work.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Donald Hall. Beacon, 1993. 132 pp. $15.00. It is tempting to be cynical about this book, Life Work--so earnest, so intending to inspire, like your grandfather telling you about the hours in the field that followed the long walks to school....

Harry Mathews.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Warren Leamon. David W. Madden. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1993. xii + 171 pp. $23.95. It's about time someone wrote books on these two, both of whom have been publishing innovative, elegantly entertaining fiction for thirty years now....

Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... Anatole Broyard. Crown/Carol Southern, 1993. 149 pp. $18.00. Anatole Broyard was a book columnist for the New York Times who wrote some notoriously vicious reviews of such stunning, innovative novels as Jack Kerouac's Visions of Cody and...