The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from March 1995

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from March 1995

Love from love. (excerpt from 'Love from Love') (fiction) (New Danish Fiction)
March 22, 1995... I dwell on the large picture book about the six senses: The Lady and the Unicorn on the Gothic tapestries. For many centuries they lay in a castle attic, rolled up and forgotten. In the nineteenth century George Sand called attention to their...

Mirror image of a young man in balance. (excerpt from 'Fortaellinger am natten') (fiction) (New Danish Fiction)
March 22, 1995... It is with benign indifference that I look upon the fact that I live in a world that talks so fast it has to breathe through its backside. Words no longer incite me. I'm an abandoned building - let's just say a forsaken and forgotten observatory....

My defect. (short story) (New Danish Fiction)
March 22, 1995... When I was twelve years old, I accidentally found out about my defect. For quite a while, I had had an inkling that there was something odd about me, but up until then, I hadn't realized that such a disastrous defect as mine even existed....

Movements of a journey. (excerpts from 'Movements of a Journey') (fiction) (New Danish Fiction)
March 22, 1995... First the sounds, the wheels bumping across the joints, punctuating the prolonged hiss of metal against metal. Then I notice my eyes are open. I notice the gray light pouring in through a narrow chink under the blind, so narrow that the...

The cats. (short story) (New Danish Fiction)
March 22, 1995... They were two hard-working people, two humble souls who had labored themselves thin and tough and moderately content. And now they had worked their way to a farm that was old and gray, as worn out as they were. There would be a lot to patch...

The Colossus of Amager. (short story) (New Danish Fiction)
March 22, 1995... Reading a book isn't a small task. The reader - that's you - has a right to know what he or she can expect. It won't be much, I must confess, so maybe it won't be worth the trouble. Anyway, this story is about things just as they were and just as...

Crazy Marie. (short story) (New Danish Fiction)
March 22, 1995... Born on the island of Funen in 1942, Kirsten Thorup made her writing debut as a poet in 1967 and has since gained prominence as a novelist and story writer. though she has also written a number of plays for radio, television, and film. Her...

Kilroy Kilroy. (excerpt from 'Kilroy Kilroy') (fiction) (New Danish Fiction)
March 22, 1995... His life begins in a blinding flash, and for this reason it has lasted as long as the universe . . . They find him drifting out beyond the reef. Burned to unconsciousness, paralyzed, and tangled in his parachute, which buoys him up with air...

At the beach. (short story) (New Danish Fiction)
March 22, 1995... The cliff slanted down toward the still steel-gray sound. It was an early spring day, and a cold transparent light seemed to rustle through the beach's pale-yellow straw and scattered patches of lime grass. The hollows stared emptily up at the...

I am the one you think. (excerpt from 'I am the One you Think') (fiction) (New Danish Fiction)
March 22, 1995... From I Am the One You Think "Actually that child never should have been born, and her parents just disappearing - leaving their car and vanishing. Drunk, obviously. Leaving the child to an elderly female and a severely disabled old maid who...

White light. (short story) (New Danish Fiction)
March 22, 1995... white light, white heat, red shock; what the hell did it mean? he sat carefully by the window at the oilcloth-covered table, face frightfully cheerful, a mask of nerves, shock, loathing . . . don't start to rationalize, don't think in capital...

The deathwatch beetle. (excerpt from 'The Deathwatch Beetle') (fiction) (New Danish Fiction)
March 22, 1995... In the bottom of the deep silver sugar spoon are seventy holes forming five petals in a stylized rose. Through this flower, Severin Hansen sprinkles oblivion over a bowl of strawberries every morning, and in the winter over his hot porridge....

Black white. (short story) (New Danish Fiction)
March 22, 1995... The blastoff, followed by the disappearance of the projectile, took place on a night when Venus was visible very close to the moon. It was like the beat of a black swan's wings. And in a flash he saw Simone sit up in bed and shield her face with...

Summer with oleanders. (short story) (New Danish Fiction)
March 22, 1995... Born in 1940, Dorrit Willumsen made her literary debut with the story collection Knagen (The Hook) in 1965. Since then she has Published novels, plays, poetry, and other story collections. Her work has been widely translated, and she has been...

Old man, Tejn. (short story) (New Danish Fiction)
March 22, 1995... They didn't meet at their usual hangout, but why should they? They had an errand to run. They met at a small place on Toldbodgade, one flight up; its dim lighting was perfect. Barney got there first. He sat with his back to the door and had his...

Half a Look of Cain: A Fantastical Narrative.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Begun in the early fifties, Half a Look of Cain was to have been Goyen's third book, following House of Breath and Ghost and Flesh, except that the author could find no publisher for a story judged too uncommercial, possibly too sexually shocking...

Selected Letters: 1940-1956.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... These two splendid volumes are just what is needed to elevate Kerouac from his lingering status as a Beatnik chronicler to his deserved status as one of the greatest American novelists of our century. Because of uncooperative, greedy publishers...

The Portable Jack Kerouac.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... These two splendid volumes are just what is needed to elevate Kerouac from his lingering status as a Beatnik chronicler to his deserved status as one of the greatest American novelists of our century. Because of uncooperative, greedy publishers...

Red the Fiend.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... "Fiend behind the fiend behind the fiend behind the / Fiend" (George Barker, "Sacred Elegy V"). The first time we met Red Mulvaney, in Sorrentino's Steelwork, it was 1951 and he was twenty-three, the full-grown fiend. He "came into Lento's,...

Watteau in Venice.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Pierre Froissart - so you know right off it's a literary novel - in this aimless cento of reflections ("Cezanne reigns over the Midi") and pronunciamenti ("Courbet, a Maoist in his youth, had strayed toward quaintness") is a silly, cynical, and...

Deliria.
March 22, 1995... Two of the blurbs on Albyn Leah Hall's first novel Deliria say, in short, here's a writer that bears watching, here's a writer to look out for. I do not understand these report card-type remarks, as though Hall's talent was not yet manifested in...

Pallaksch, Pallaksch.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... A single sentence from "The Border" is emblematic of what has and is yet to come in this volume of short stories: "To these last survivors of a rural world, nothing seemed strange." One has the impression that few inhabit the world of Giraudon's...

Lucker and Tiffany Peel Out.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Tiffany and Lucker are a British couple. They are also a couple of somewhat competent misfits. He's a photographer (his one area of competence) doing a piece on a rock band. She is a tag-along doing a story on same band. Tiffany is more...

A Walking Fire.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Through a shuttling loom of then-and-now storytelling, Miner re-creates the conviction and banishment of Lear's Cordelia in her contemporary character Cora Casey. Cora has returned to America from Canada because her father is dying of cancer. She...

Happenstance: The Husband's Story, the Wife's Story.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Happenstance comprises two of Carole Shields's novellas - one that lends the present volume its title, published in 1980, and the other, A Fairly Conventional Woman, in 1982. Penguin's decision to present these two works between the same covers...

The Book of Orgasms.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Asylum Arts is not afraid to publish odd books - books that force us to think about the relationships between language and "miracle," narrative and experience. Their latest book is surely one of their most "perverse," surrealistic offerings....

Empire of Dreams.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Giannina Braschi has earned her preferred label of modern writer. Latin American, Puerto Rican, New Yorker, and feminist are apt labels as well, but though they might be selling points, they do little to describe her writing. Braschi writes with...

The Holy Embrace.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... With this book the Marlboro Press completes the publication of Brelich's literary works in English: three novels in all, by an author who made his debut when he was sixty, in 1972, and died ten years later. A small corpus, perhaps, but...

Nobody Nothing Never.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... It is February, "that unreal month," in Rincon, Argentina. The heat is depressing; it is a torrid zone. "Only at night do people come out onto the sidewalks." For some time a horse killer has been loose in the area. He comes at night and fires a...

The Tunnel.
March 22, 1995... Although Edson has been writing his odd texts for more than thirty years, he has never received much recognition in this country. His work, however, has been acclaimed in Europe; there he is viewed as a contemporary master of the prose-poem....

The Butcher Boy.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... This trade paperback reprint of McCabe's 1992 Booker Prize Nominee and winner of the Irish Times-Aer Lingus Literature Prize for Fiction launches the "Cutting Edge" series from Delta, one month after the imprint's founding editor, Jeanne Cavelos...

Mississippi History.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... The nine stories in Mississippi History deal with poverty, racism, and loneliness (or lovelessness), and are set in or around Indianola, Mississippi, a town midway between Jackson and Memphis, but not by any direct road. Peopled by a variety of...

Chelsea Girls.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Chelsea Girls is Eileen Myles's personal chronicle of the seventies, and of some of the sixties and eighties too. Alcohol, speed procured from crooked diet doctors, ratty Bowery bars, sex - all kinds - musicians, poets, alcoholic fathers, huge...

Judgment.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Judgment, first published in 1963, is one of the central texts of Japanese atomic-bomb literature. Combining a darkly comic study of comparative manners (Japanese and American) with the sweep and plummet of Dostoyevski, Hotta's ambitious and...

The Lizard's Smile.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... The Lizard's Smile is Ribeiro's third book to be translated into English, and the first not translated by Ribeiro himself Landers's translation, though slightly mannered, does much to render the feel and flavor of the original. The language as a...

Atlantis: Model 1924.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Best known for his critically acclaimed science fiction and fantasy novels, Delany here writes a kind of homage to the Harlem Renaissance novel, something closer to Jean Toomer's Cane than to his other works. Teenage Sam takes the train from...

Limits of the Sensible World.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Consisting of eighteen fictions culled from a hundred stories written over a thirty-year period, it is safe to say that Limits of the Sensible World represents Sallis at his best. Although several stories are disappointing and seem to rely too...

The Waterworks.
March 22, 1995... An almost uncanny ability to reconstruct historical material and a spellbinding facility to tell a good tale - these are the qualities that have made E. L. Doctorow one of America's most distinguished literary practitioners and the qualities that...

Unnatural Acts and Other Stories.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Masquerade Books is one of those medium-sized houses whose titles you aren't going to find in the chain stores, maybe not even in most of the independents. Its goal is to publish erotic fiction and other related books, much in the same vein of...

House of Splendid Isolation.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Edna O'Brien's new novel focuses on the burden of Irish history in a contemporary society that is both turbulent and tragic. This new work marks a departure in O'Brien's fiction; in the past she has resisted political themes, claiming to have...

The Dada Almanac.
March 22, 1995... Likening the atmosphere of Tristan Tzara's scandalous Revue Dada to the electricity of the crowd listening to jazz in the Casino de Paris, Cocteau observed that "If one accepts jazz bands (whose ancestor is our own honest-to-goodness one-man...

Transgressions: The Iowa Anthology of Innovative Fiction.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Transgressions samples the work of thirty authors in the form of thirty-three short stories and novel excerpts. Authors range from established innovators (Kathy Acker, John Barth, Robert Coover, Rikki Ducornet, John Hawkes, Ronald Sukenick) to...

The Fabulists.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... In his first novel, The Fabulists, the Irish poet Philip Casey is ostensibly concerned with describing a love affair between Mungo and Tess, two unemployed and unhappily married Dubliners. But what makes this novel so remarkable and compelling is...

Outstaring Nature's Eye: The Fiction of John McGahern.
March 22, 1995... In his first novel, The Fabulists, the Irish poet Philip Casey is ostensibly concerned with describing a love affair between Mungo and Tess, two unemployed and unhappily married Dubliners. But what makes this novel so remarkable and compelling is...

The Burning Library.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Although Edmund White is an interesting novelist - I am thinking of Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples - he is also a wise, close reader. He is not an exponent of queer theory" - whatever this phrase means - and he recognizes...

Home for the Day.
March 22, 1995... Although Edmund White is an interesting novelist - I am thinking of Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples - he is also a wise, close reader. He is not an exponent of queer theory" - whatever this phrase means - and he recognizes...

The Primary Colors.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Thirty years ago in an Algerian oasis, I saw a young woman cocooned in white turn to a man who was walking behind her and - with kohl-lined eyes and the red-hot ciphers of her hennaed hands and feet - reveal her sexual soul, its famishment and...

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Wolff gives us a brilliant, obsessive collection of stories written in the last fifteen years. He doesn't seem to like postmodernists - say Abish or Mathews - but he is fascinated by edgy, intense disruptions of the familiar. His choices are new,...

A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Paul West's reputation was established and is sustained by his fiction, and many regard him as one of the finest prose stylists alive today. However, he has written nonfiction steadily throughout his career, and some of his most fascinating works...

The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Handke is such a surprising, brilliant writer that we must look closely at anything he offers us. He often transforms genres. His "essays" on "storytelling" are remarkable because they become meditations, narratives, and parables. They "move"...

Imperium.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... By the time Polish authorities stripped Ryszard Kapuscinski of his press credentials for his involvement with the Solidarity trade union movement in 1981, he had reported on twenty-seven revolutions. Kapuscinski wrote two versions of his reports,...

Better Than Life.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1995... Daniel Pennac says he favors brief summaries of books, so brief I will be: Better than Life is a book about the joys of reading, the off-putting ways books (particularly fiction) are presented to the young by teachers and parents, and the...