The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from March 1998

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from March 1998

The Week of Golden Silence. (short story)(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... Monday It was a very common type of bet. We made it Sunday evening, yesterday. Pedestrians and cars slid by the window of the cafe. Like fish in an aquarium. Coats hung on the rack near the entrance like stuffed scarecrows. Darkness was...

Beckett is Alive: Text to Myself. (short stories)(short stories) (New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... Somebody once maintained that somewhere at some point in time Beckett had died, so he'd heard or read somewhere, he couldn't remember exactly where, but I haven't managed to clarify whether or not he's right. Anyone whom I happen to ask, "Is...

Cucumber Aria.(fiction)(excerpt from "Meness berns")(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... On the national holiday, the flags flew from the flagpoles, even I could see that from the hospital ward. The holiday passed like a shudder. A couple of intoxicated voices sang during the night. Later I heard somebody had been stabbed over by the...

The Wonderful Bird.(fiction)(excerpt from "Meness berns")(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... It happened at school. During breaks. That's when all the grades, all sorts of faces, mix in the hallways. We were separated from the youngest kids of all. Starting with fourth grade, though, we met the little buggers face to face. I...

Fate.(fiction)(excerpt from "Meness berns")(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... Each of us has a different fate. That's what Grandma told her grandson, little Charlie. He could hardly understand what she had said, for he was little. All he knew was that everybody--Grandma, Dad, and Mom--lived happy lives, except that...

Etude with a Bullet.(fiction)(excerpt from "Meness berns")(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... They say there is no God. That's not true. There is. And everybody's got one. There are craggy mountains on both sides. Once, two gods encountered each other here. The young man's weapon reminded him of a fiddle. The fiddler...

Nice Guy Moon.(fiction)(excerpt from "Meness berns")(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... The Moon is a nice guy. I realized that right away, as soon as he arrived in town. He didn't go to the ear-splitting bar, but came to my house--climbed in the window of my room. "Hallo there!" "Hallo, hallo," he replied, went over to...

Dundaga Mornings.(fiction)(excerpt from "Meness berns")(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... Summer shimmered like something about to overflow. Milk ran in streams. In the lakes and ponds, ducks fluttered around and the local boys went swimming in the raw. Among the reeds, past their feet, slid fish, eternally inaudible, expressing the...

Pleasures of the Saints. (fiction)(excerpts from "Trifles and Pleasures")
March 22, 1998... Theresa opened her eyes in a round bed. With each new awakening, she was surprised to be lying there like a raindrop. And right next to her--Augustine, another raindrop in the round bed. Augustine was not awake. Since they never woke together,...

Veronica, the Schoolgirl.(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... I was dicing an onion and crying when Victor entered the room. He sat down at the kitchen table, produced a pack of cards and began to play solitaire. I chopped eggs, squid, added sour cream and salt, and suddenly remembered I didn't have any...

The Stairs.(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... I do not know and am not capable of understanding what is happening to me, or what has, perhaps, finally transpired. I cannot find a name for it, short of calling it madness. This might, of course, represent the only solution, but for obvious...

Summer Long (The Zone).(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... Normunds is back from Germany, Gundega from Australia, Inese from Sweden, but Janis--from the countryside. He's spent a month there alone with his dog, he's transformed. His hands don't shake anymore, he's stopped stammering, his muddled thinking...

Tale No. 13.(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... Concerning an important event in the court of Emperor Frederick and other adventures which befall the knight San Alberto when he sets out to take away from Baron Miserabius his faithful Katherine, while her deceased father is unable to hold on to...

From Sigmata. (fiction)(excerpts from "Seven Stories About Love")(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... You, who hear and feel and know, oh listen to me! You--supreme One, but no lord, I'm not calling You by name, You here. Listen, hear me! Come along and don't judge me, come, so I can talk and live with You. Come across the sea and the fog,...

Eventide. (fiction)(excerpts from "Pildvielas spelu laciem")(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... The scamper of bare feet on the forever squeaking staircase to the loft in dark brown stained wood, a hushed little laugh as the door opens, the scent of coffee tingling the nostrils, waking the senses, wunderbar, oh, wunderbar, the record...

Storm Approaching.(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... The summer morning is green and Maria is doing her household chores. To be more precise, she has gotten up and is going to the barn to milk the cows. As she walks along the path to the low-lying building where the cattle make different noises,...

The Flying Fish.(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... A ventilation fan came on, its hum overpowering the steady drone of the airport. Napkins in glasses fluttered in the flow of air, a newspaper quivered in someone's hands, the corners of tablecloths waved, ashes slid slowly into one corner of the...

The Bookstore in America: Woodland Pattern.(New Latvian Fiction)
March 22, 1998... The previous article in this series focused on Borders Books and Music as one possibility of what the bookstore and bookselling might be in the future, and what forebodes for the future and availability of books in the United States. Following...

William Eastlake (1917-1997).
March 22, 1998... The first time I met William Eastlake he was both appalled and amused to hear that I had been drawn to his work by seeing the film of Castle Keep, his World War II novel. I was a rarity, it seemed: the first reader he had met who would confess to...

Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings.
March 22, 1998... Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Library of America, 1997. 829 pp. $35.00. The Library of America here collects the four short novels published during West's lifetime, seven short stories, a play, two screenplays, selected letters, and what is likely the...

The Word Desire.
March 22, 1998... Rikki Ducornet. Henry Holt, 1997. 193 pp. $22.00. As with The Fountains of Neptune and her other acclaimed novels, Rikki Ducornet's new story collection is a crystal-work of poetic dimensions. The twelve stories contained here are so...

Collected Works, Volume Two: 1976-1986.
March 22, 1998... Paul Metcalf Coffee House, 1997. 600 pp. $35.00. At the beginning of I-57, his account of driving the length of Interstate 57 during his fifty-seventh year, Paul Metcalf writes, "I have never stopped writing this, and it has not yet begun." If...

The Farewell Symphony.
March 22, 1998... Edmund White. Knopf, 1997. 413 pp. $25.00. With The Farewell Symphony, Edmund White's final entry in his autobiographical trilogy, I was left wondering when White ever had the time to write a book about his climb up the literary ladder in 1970s...

A Book of Memories.
March 22, 1998... Peter Nadas. Trans. Ivan Sanders with Imre Goldstein. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997. 706 pp. $30.00. There are rare moments when a reviewer recognizes that a book he is discussing is a true work of art, an astonishing achievement. I once...

Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist.
March 22, 1998... Anthony Cronin. HarperCollins, 1997. 645 pp. $30.00. This level-headed biography is informed by a healthy impatience with the sycophantic testimonies that have turned Beckett into the official saint of the postwar era. It sheds much light on...

S.
March 22, 1998... Patrick Deville, Jean Echenoz, Olivier Rolin, Mark Polizzotti, Florence Delay, Sonja Greenlee and Harry Mathews. Brookline, 1997. 97 pp. Paper: $12.95. A truly collaborative effort, S. finds seven French and American writers writing about a...

The Tetherballs of Bougainville.
March 22, 1998... Mark Leyner. Harmony, 1997. 224 pp. $21.00. The fading lights of Leyner's first novel Et tu, Babe find us scrambling for cover in an infomercial gone ballistic, urging us to buy buy buy our way into TEAM LEYNER! world, if we so dare. Now, five...

An Irish Eye.
March 22, 1998... John Hawkes. Viking, 1997. 159 pp. $22.95; Lesley Marx. Crystals out of Chaos: John Hawkes and the Shapes of Apocalypse. Fairleigh Dickinson, 1997. 244 pp. $39.50. John Hawkes is yet another contemporary American novelist who has unaccountably...

Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure.
March 22, 1998... Paul Auster. Henry Holt, 1997. 449 pp. $25.00. This book is an Auster museum: a memoir followed by three appendices of the writer's early projects. For many Auster enthusiasts the appendices' three plays, baseball card game, and full-length...

Breakfast in Babylon.
March 22, 1998... Emer Martin. Mariner Books (Houghton Mifflin), 1997. 321 pp. $12.00. Emer Martin's first novel, the winner of a major award when first published last year in her native Ireland, is as brutal as it is beautiful. Set primarily in Paris, with...

Already Dead: A California Gothic.
March 22, 1998... Denis Johnson. HarperCollins, 1997. 435 pp. $25.00. Although Johnson is drawn to sinners, deviants, and criminals, he does not glorify them. Instead, he attempts to find "virtues" in their misguided choices. He is interested in the...

Guide.
March 22, 1998... Dennis Cooper. Grove/Atlantic, 1997. 176 pp. $22.00. In Guide, the fourth book of his five-novel cycle, Dennis Cooper charts passage between a variety of seeming oppositions: desire and its fulfillment, reality and fiction, life and death,...

Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philopsophy.
March 22, 1998... Gerald L. Bruns. Johns Hopkins, 1997. 339 pp. $39.95. Twenty percent of Gerald L. Bruns's study of Blanchot's life and work consists of endnotes, a fact that would generally predict the other eighty percent to be fashioned in late...

Making Waves: Essays.
March 22, 1998... Mario Vargas Llosa. Trans. John King. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 338 pp. $27.50. Author, journalist, literary critic, playwright, filmmaker, presidential candidate. Mario Vargas Llosa is a jack-of-all-trades. Collected here--many for the first...

Big Blondes.
March 22, 1998... Jean Echenoz. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. The New Press, 1997. 201 pp. $22.00. The winner of several prestigious literary prizes, and one of France's foremost contemporary writers, Jean Echenoz is best known for his tongue-incheek humor and his...

A History Maker.
March 22, 1998... Alasdair Gray. Harvest (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 1996. 224 pp. Paper: $14.00. Alasdair Gray sets his recent novel in the twenty-third century, and like many science fiction works, it is full of sex, violence, and adventure. But the novel is...

Here.
March 22, 1998... Nathalie Sarraute. Trans. Barbara Wright. Foreword by E. Nicole Meyer. George Braziller, 1997. 165 pp. $22.50. As a scholar of French literature, I rarely recommend a translated novel over the original. But the fact is that Nathalie Sarraute...

Helene Cixous Rootprints: Memory and Life-Writing.
March 22, 1998... Helene Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Routledge, 1997. 254 pp. Paper: $17.95. Rootprints is an excellent introduction to the multifaceted work of Helene Cixous, who has written more than thirty books of poetic fiction, countless critical...

Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation.
March 22, 1998... Marie Darrieussecq. Trans. Linda Coverdale. The New Press, 1997. 151 pp. $18.00. The publication of Marie Darrieussecq's unusual first novel, in France, was one of the literary sensations of 1996. An immediate success, the book was soon...

Busted Scotch: Selected Stories.
March 22, 1998... James Kelman. Norton, 1997. 264 pp. $23.00. These are bleak, beautiful stories. James Kelman has a startling ability to wiggle into the skins of his characters--often angry, bitter, beaten, lost--and speak in their voices. Of the thirty-five...

Petrolio.
March 22, 1998... Pier Paolo Pasolini. Trans. Ann Goldstein. Pantheon, 1997. 470pp. $27.00. Pasolini claimed in a 1975 interview that this projected novel would serve as "a kind of `summa' of all my experiences, all my memories." First conceived in 1972, it...

X20: A Novel of (Not) Smoking.
March 22, 1998... Richard Beard. Arcade, 1997. 320 pp. $22.95. With X20, Richard Beard takes a novel approach to the concept of addiction. Gregory Simpson, in the wake of a friend's lung cancer death, quits smoking. Replacing cigarettes with a pen, Gregory...

Byrne: A Novel.
March 22, 1998... Anthony Burgess. Carroll & Graf, 1997. 150 pp. $20.00. Shades of Alexander Pope and George Gordon Lord Byron, a novel in verse! This is no ordinary novel (but then neither was A Clockwork Orange). From the first stanza to the last, we are in...

With Her in Ourland.
March 22, 1998... Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Ed. Mary Jo Deegan and Michael R. Hill. Praeger, 1997. 216 pp. Cloth: $55.00; paper: $15.95. With Her in Ourland brings the intrepid Ellador from Herland into the world of her husband, sociologist Vandyck Jennings, as...

Great Apes.
March 22, 1998... Will Self. Grove/Atlantic, 1997. 416 pp. $24.00 In Self's new book, chimpanzees are the superior species. They drive the cars, paint the pictures, and act as agents and therapists. In the evolutionary game of strategy, teeth and nails,...

Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.
March 22, 1998... Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy, eds. Norton, 1998. 672 pp. $24.95. Norton has once again worked its genius. Whatever the hell the term postmodern might mean (to Norton, it apparently means anything after modern), it would seem to...

Dra-.
March 22, 1998... Stacey Levine. Sun & Moon, 1997. 150pp. Paper: $11.95. Levine has created a three-dimensional world of two-dimensional people. The world of Dra-- is a literal labyrinth of bureaucracy, where endless hallways, train stations, and indoor airports...

Gertrude Stein Remembered.
March 22, 1998... Linda Simon, ed. Nebraska, 1997. 195 pp. Paper: $15.00. Had Gertrude Stein not possessed a truly fascinating personality, her publications would have remained interesting to only the few literary scholars intent on expanding the canon of works...

Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat.
March 22, 1998... Grete Weil. Trans. John Barret T. Godine, 1997. 160 pp. $22.95. This troubled and affecting novel examines the psychological damage suffered by a German correspondent who lives in Amsterdam during the Nazi regime. Although Andreas's journey to...

Death in Equality.
March 22, 1998... Lucinda Ebersole. St. Martin's, 1997. 146 pp. $19.95, "Equality" is a small town in Alabama where people go to die, especially people called Cordelia, the last in a line of whom has left New York and lies riddled with cancer. Hers is one of the...

Rolling the R's.
March 22, 1998... R. Zamora Linmark. Kaya, 1997. 149pp. Paper: $12.95. Of the group of adolescents featured in R. Zamora Linmark's Rolling the R's, many are recent immigrants to America from Asia, and most are of mixed racial descent, but all are searching for...

Acid Plaid: New Scottish Writing.
March 22, 1998... Harry Ritchie, ed. Arcade, 1997. 256 pp. Paper: $13.95. A diverse collection of work--stories, essays, poems, and a play--makes up this colorful, brash anthology. Acid Plaid is a sort of book-length yelp of joy at the new vitality of Scottish...

Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz.
March 22, 1998... Irene Dische. Metropolitan, 1997. 302 pp. $23.00. I am pleased by the fact that this novel confirms Dische's ability to fuse comedy and sadness. This novel, like Strange Traffic, moves gracefully from the mysteries of existence to the...

The Celibacy Club.
March 22, 1998... Janice Eidus. City Lights, 1997. 200 pp. Paper: $9.95. Janice Eidus's second collection of nineteen comic short stories traffics in the myths and fairy tales, fantasies, and pop icons that constitute our "collective unconscious." Her...

Class Trip.
March 22, 1998... Emmanuel Carrere. Trans. Linda Coverdale. Metropolitan, 1997. 162 pp. $19.95. Carrere's latest novel has been a popular success, both in the States and abroad (winner of the Prix Femina; rights sold in fourteen countries). And for good reason,...

The Rendezvous.
March 22, 1998... Justine Levy. Trans. Lydia Davis. Scribner's, 1997. 142 pp. $22.00. Narrated by eighteen-year-old Louise as she sits in a cafe all day waiting for her unreliable mother to come to their rendezvous, Levy's wonderful first novel paints a...

Dangerous Virtues.
March 22, 1998... Ana Maria Moix. Trans. Margaret E. W. Jones. Nebraska, 1997. 153pp. Paper: $10.00. This translation marks the first appearance of Spanish writer Ana Maria Moix in English. Dangerous Virtues is a collection of five stories that alternates...

When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth.
March 22, 1998... Fernanda Eberstadt. Knopf, 1997. 404 pp. $25.00. When Isaac Hooker meets the Geblers, he is just a step away from homelessness. Like most people in the world that revolves around Dolly and Alfred's Aurora Foundation, he is an artist; but he...

Rules of the Game, Volume One: Scratches.
March 22, 1998... Michel Leiris. Volume One: Scratches. Trans. Lydia Davis. Johns Hopkins, 1997. 258 pp. Paper: $15.95; Rules of the Game, Volume Two: Scraps. Trans. Lydia Davis. Johns Hopkins, 1997. 244 pp. Paper: $15.95. Surely the paperback publication of...

1968: A History in Verse.
March 22, 1998... Edward Sanders. 1968: Black Sparrow, 1997. 260 pp. Cloth: $25.00; paper: $14.00. 1968 saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King and RFK, My Lai and the Tet offensive, Soviet tanks in Prague and barricades in the streets o Paris, Electric...

Drought.
March 22, 1998... Debra DiBlasi. New Directions, 1997. 89 pp. Paper: $10.95. Drought opens on "House" in June heat. It takes up barely half the page. Turn the page. There is "Woman," Willa, on verso, and on recto, an evaporating pond "Drowning in air." It is a...

Oriental Girls Desire Romance.
March 22, 1998... Catherine Liu. Kaya, 1997. 354pp. Paper: $13.95. The narrator of Catherine Liu's first novel, a smart, young Chinese-American woman drifting among the addictive excesses of 1980s New York City, feels trapped in "a perpetual state of...

Blood Pact and Other Stories.
March 22, 1998... Mario Benedetti. Trans. Daniel Balderston, et al. Curbstone, 1997. 213 pp. Paper: $13.95. This superb collection, nearly thirty stories spanning forty years, brings together tales of urban romance and political strife from the beloved...

Old Scores.
March 22, 1998... Nicholas Delbanco. Warner Books, 1997. 271 pp. $24.00. We know the story: the sixties; college; the professor, Paul Ballard, and the student he becomes involved with, Elizabeth Sieverdsen; the brief flaring of their love, its near predictable...

A Guide to Twentieth-Century Women Novelists.
March 22, 1998... Kathleen Wheeler. Blackwell Publishers, 1997. 442 pp. $65-00. Perhaps what's most remarkable about this ambitious, encyclopedic book is that Wheeler wrote all of it, and in so doing demonstrates a wide range of reading and taste. But as with...

The Troika.
March 22, 1998... Stepan Chapman. Ministry of Whimsy, 1997. 251 pp. Paper: $14.99. Consider this an E-ticket ride and you'll walk away smiling for being whipped through surprising twists and loops--no final payoff, but that's okay: the point's the journey, not...

The Man Who Walked to the Moon.
March 22, 1998... Howard McCord. McPherson, 1997. 123 pp. $18.00. Near the end of Howard McCord's novella, the narrator says his story is "a veritable account of a lucid insanity of long duration, an oblique confession, an apologia pro vita sua, a fantasy spun...

Cruel Fictions, Cruel realities: Short Stories by Latin American Women Writers.
March 22, 1998... Kathy S. Leonard, ed. and trans. Latin American Literary Review Press, 1997. 131 pp. Paper: $15.95. This new fiction anthology features nineteen excellent stories by twelve South American women writers. As the title suggests, cruelty is the...

Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley.
March 22, 1998... Jonathan Yardley. Random House, 1997. 255 pp. $25.00. This book is an embarrassment. Even the author's photo is awful, though perhaps it reveals something of the problem with the book; in it, Yardley's expression seems to be saying: "We never...

Passer en Douce a la Douane: L'ecriture Minimaliste de Minuit: Deville, Echenoz, Redonnet et Toussaint.
March 22, 1998... Ficke Schoots. Rodolpi B.V. (Amsterdam and Atlanta), 1997. 234 pp. No price listed. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it--impose some sort of order on what continues to be a near manic production of high-quality literary novels in...