The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from March 2000

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from March 2000

The Proximity of Brad to Bradford: A Brief Introduction to the Lifework of Bradford Morrow.
March 22, 2000... Bradford Morrow, who has the uncanny ability to conjure the singularly fitting phrase, like a magician whose head is his enchanted cabinet, is particularly fond of a saying of Emerson's: my cow milks me. Perhaps he likes it so much because he...

An Interview with Bradford Morrow.
March 22, 2000... PATRICK MCGRATH: Before the novels, there was Conjunctions. How did that come to be? Let's start there and move wherever we need to move to. BRADFORD MORROW: Conjunctions originally was to be simply one volume, a Festschrift for James...

From Ariel.(Excerpt)(Fiction)
March 22, 2000... These excerpts from Ariel are drawn from several different passages in the novel, resequenced and somewhat abbreviated here to offer a narrative rhythm alternating Ariel Rankin and her biological father, Kip Calder, whom she's never met....

Transforming the Essence: Bradford Morrow's Come Sunday.
March 22, 2000... Krieger Bradford Morrow's Come Sunday offers an epigraph from Leonardo da Vinci's Prophecies: "One shall be born from small beginnings which will quickly become vast, and will respect nothing in creation, indeed with its power will...

You're Dancing?: The Occasional Essays of Bradford Morrow.
March 22, 2000... A foreword, an afterword? What's the occasion? A collection got up by an editor--on theater, on scribblers' sleepless nights, on the imprint, or residue, of the Bible in a writer's life--eliciting the belletristic response. The peculiar angle...

Amazing Grace: Tracing the Almanac's Branchings.
March 22, 2000... They spoke in light, when they felt like speaking. They spoke only to her, they said. When she asked them what they wanted, they retreated into the bark of their tree, and the night turned back to black. Sometimes she just watched them where...

Then What ...?
March 22, 2000... In August 1994 Bradford Morrow's body was carried by ambulance for hours from an upstate New York retreat to St. Vincent's Hospital in lower Manhattan. Its midsection had soured in a pain that nearly chased the life signs flee, and surgery had...

Trinity Fields.
March 22, 2000... It begins like a rocket launch, with a thrust of energy, a delirious unleashed syntactical arc that fuses the whooping energy of three boys joyriding in a stolen car with the landscape, the galaxy, time itself: "We came careening across the...

Imagining Giovanni's Gift.
March 22, 2000... Prologue Do not read this essay. Chapter I: Once upon a before time Once upon a before time, all of duration and space, all of the energy and matter that would comprise the entirety of existence--planets and Band-Aids, winks,...

In the Middle of the Journey: On the Building Site of Bradford Morrow's Trilogy.
March 22, 2000... This is not really an essay about Brad Morrow or his projected trilogy so much as it is a reflection on the nature of linked works of fiction as inspired--and constrained--by a reading of Morrow's Trinity Fields and a selection of about 150...

Of Morrow and Tomorrow.
March 22, 2000... Once at least, Miss Havisham let him into the cobwebbed villa and raised her skirts to show him true, faithful mice nibbling on her scabbed-up nether parts. He never recovered from this beast-in-the-jungle episode, having ever after a bemused,...

Conjunctions: A Reader's Appreciation.
March 22, 2000... After eighteen years and thirty-three issues, Conjunctions' salutary role in American letters is now beyond dispute. And yet for all its history, Conjunctions remains something of a mystery. It hasn't taken, like the Partisan Review of the...

On the Conjunction of Editing and Composition.
March 22, 2000... I remember the first time I saw the reissue of Wyndham Lewis's "Review of the Great English Vortex," BLAST. I was twenty-one, walking home, sweaty, exhausted, and alive with the noise of the city after a Pete Ubu concert at Irving Plaza. In the...

The Leaps and Bounds of Conjunctions.
March 22, 2000... When, late in her life, Georgia O'Keefe was asked to comment on the series of Alfred Stieglitz's famous photographic portraits of her, she said, "I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I had lived many lives." The thirty-three...

Only Conjunct!
March 22, 2000... Ezra Pound's useful advice had been, think of it not as a box within which but a center around which/every item. A literary journal can be as various as the persons committed to its publication for all the myriad reasons they will inevitably...

A Roving Universe with a Constant Idea.
March 22, 2000... Knowing that Morrow always resists stating a confining manifesto with regard to Conjunctions, when I nevertheless recently asked him what the journal is, he replied, "Conjunctions is a roving universe with a constant idea." He also allowed that...

Morrow's Conjunctions: A View from Below.
March 22, 2000... My friend Bradford Morrow has written some beautiful prose, in particular the beginning of The Almanac Branch, where eldritch sexuality moves and shimmers in the foliage outside a young girl's window. But in this brief tribute I plan to pay...

A Bradford Morrow Checklist.
March 22, 2000... Books Giovanni's Gift, a novel. New York: Viking, 1997. Paperback edition, New York: Penguin, 1998. Audiobook, Los Angeles: The Publishing Mills, 1997. London: HarperCollins/Flamingo, 1997. Paperback edition, London: Flamingo,...

DEAR EDITOR.(Short Story)
March 22, 2000... Dear Editor: As you probably have guessed, I have a castration problem. My particular problem is that the only times my wife wants to talk to me is when I am watching TV or am in the bathroom. Just have me doing either of those two things, and...

Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Marguerite Young. Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs. Knopf, 1999. 599 pp. $35.00. Marguerite Young, author of that immense dreamscape of a novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965), worked on Harp Song for a...

Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation.(Review)
March 22, 2000... William H. Gass. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. Knopf, 1999. 233 pp. $26.00. Early in Reading Rilke Gass makes clear his subject's long-standing grip upon him. Rilke, Gass writes, "has taught me what real art...

Night of Amber.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Sylvie Germain. Night of Amber David R. Godine, 1999. 336 pp. $23.95. The sequel to the acclaimed The Book of Nights is an ambitious, complex stew made up of many different extremes: sadism and sentimentality, storytelling and...

Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Warren Motte. Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1999. 224 pp. $45.00. Motte is the author of Playtexts, Oulipo, and Questioning Edmond Jabes. Although he concentrates upon contemporary...

The Book of Happiness.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Nina Berberova. The Book of Happiness. Trans. Marian Schwartz. New Directions, 1999. 205 pp. $23.95. Can those who can't be happy inspire one who can to make it a life's work? If at first the heroine of Nina Berberova's The Book of...

The Third Body.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Helene Cixous. The Third Body. Trans. Keith Cohen. Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999. 161 pp. $24.95. This novel, originally written in 1970, examines the narrator's relationship with her lover, one consisting of many binaries--separations...

Adrift in a Vanishing City.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Vincent Czyz. Adrift in a Vanishing City. Preface by Samuel R. Delany. Intro. and afterword by Vincent Czyz. Voyant, 1998. 256 pp. Paper: $10.00. Adrift in a Vanishing City by Vincent Czyz (pronounced "Chez") is a collection of nine...

The Nanny and the Iceberg.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Ariel Dorfman. The Nanny and the Iceberg. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. 358pp. $25.00. The Chilean Pavilion at the 1992 World Expo in Seville featured an Antarctic iceberg as its main attraction. This surreal effort at highlighting...

The Christ of Fish.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Yoel Hoffmann. The Christ of Fish. Trans. Eddie Levenston. New Directions, 1999. 150 pp. $21.95. In one of the 233 short segments that comprise the work, Hoffmann's narrator (omnipresent yet self-effacing) invites us to consider just what...

Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Ken Kalfus. Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies. Milkweed, 1999. 289 pp. $22.00. The Ken Kalfus of Thirst, a first collection of stories that were as varied in their settings as the forms they took (including a baseball trivia quiz, a...

Cracks.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Sheila Kohler. Cracks. Zoland, 1999. 165 pp. $21.00. This haunting novel is like the other Kohler books I have reviewed in this journal: an elliptical, erotic work. It explores the mysteries of desire and violence, the perverse longings we...

Breakfast on Pluto.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Patrick McCabe. Breakfast on Pluto. HarperFlamingo, 1998. 202 pp. $22.00. With Breakfast on Pluto, his fourth novel and his most recent foray into the realm of Irish life, Patrick McCabe again reveals his mastery of character. Patrick...

Nadirs.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Herta Muller. Nadirs. Trans. and afterword by Sieglinde Lug. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1999. 122 pp. Paper: $13.00. Biographical fiction has grown more popular as of late, and an unfortunate effect of this has been a return to the Dickensian...

Yellow Jack.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Josh Russell. Yellow Jack. Norton, 1999. 250 pp. $23.95. Josh Russell's first novel, Yellow Jack, chronicles the life of Claude Marchand, a daguerreotypist living in 1840s New Orleans, slowly going mad from inhalation of mercury fumes....

Love in a Dead Language.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Lee Siegel. Love in a Dead Language. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999. 375 pp. $25.00. This comic novel primarily concerns itself with sex and love, together and apart. It centers on Professor Leopold Roth, happily married but consumed with...

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Dubravka Ugresic. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Trans. Celia Hawkesworth. New Directions, 1999. 238 pp. $24.95. This astonishing novel deserves more than one reading. It is a daring effort to explore the meanings of exile, loss,...

Never to Return.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Esther Tusquets. Never to Return. Trans. Barbara F. Ichiishi. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1999. 191 pp. $15.00. Though described on its jacket as a "woman's inner journey to understanding through her encounter with Freudian psychoanalysis,"...

Before You Sleep.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Linn Ullmann. Before You Sleep. Trans. Tiina Nunnally. Viking, 1999. 304 pp. $23.95. Although the main part of Ullmann's novel begins with the recognizable phrase "Once upon a time," this story immediately stretches far from a traditional...

Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Thisbe Nissen. Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night. Univ. of Iowa Press, 1999. 244 pp. Paper: $19.95. In her debut collection, Thisbe Nissen tackles big, life-altering subjects as told by an almost entirely adolescent cast of...

All Quiet on the Orient Express.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Magnus Mills. All Quiet on the Orient Express. Arcade, 1999. 224 pp. $23.95. Anyone familiar with the absurd workingman's comedy of Magnus Mills's The Restraint of Beasts will find All Quiet on the Orient Express familiar territory. Here,...

Billy and Girl.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Deborah Levy. Billy and Girl. Dalkey Archive, 1999. 185 pp. Paper: $13.95. Deborah Levy's Billy and Girl is the story of a brother and sister abandoned by both mother and father, the former to defection, the latter to a suicide so...

The Sweet Smell of Psychosis.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Will Self. The Sweet Smell of Psychosis. Illustrated by Martin Rowson. Grove, 1999. 89 pp. Paper: $15.00. Self's body of work is perhaps best termed as idiosyncratic; its rendering of the unusual and perverted as familiar and attractive is...

Splitting.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Brian Clark. Splitting. Wordcraft of Oregon, 1999. 174 pp. Paper: $9.00. Brian Clark's romp through a world of static television screens and desert landscapes sends science crashing headlong into fiction with its highbeams on. The...

Selected Non-Fictions.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Jorge Luis Borges. Selected Non-Fictions. Viking, 1999. 559 pp. $40.00. In his celebrated collection Ficciones, Borges presented prose that read like histories, documentations, and scholarly works, but nothing resembling a traditional...

"I Remain in Darkness".(Review)
March 22, 2000... Annie Ernaux. "I Remain in Darkness." Trans. Tanya Leslie. Seven Stories Press, 1999.96 pp. $18.95; Lyn Thomas. Annie Ernaux's work is remarkably of a piece, each book circling back to paraphrase, correct, emendate, and reinvest earlier...

Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and Her Audience.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and Her Audience. Berg, 1999. 202 pp. $65.00. Annie Ernaux's work is remarkably of a piece, each book circling back to paraphrase, correct, emendate, and reinvest earlier ones. Einstein said of...

The Monstrous and the Marvelous.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Rikki Ducornet. The Monstrous and the Marvelous. City Lights, 1999. 124 pp. Paper: $12.95. Rikki Ducornet introduces her The Monstrous and the Marvelous, a collection of essays, by hoping that its "reveries" will evoke some of the...

The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets.(Review)
March 22, 2000... David Lehman. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. Doubleday, 1998. 433 pp. $27.50. The impact of the New York School on American poetry during the second half of the twentieth century cannot be overstated. By...

The Consecration of the Writer, 1750-1830.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Paul Benichou. The Consecration of the Writer, 1750-1830. Trans. Mark K. Jensen. Intro. Tzvetan Todorov. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1999. 454 pp. $25.00. Don't be put off by the dates in The Consecration of the Writer, 1750-1830. Paul...

Ulysses: En-Gendered Perspectives.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Kimberly J. Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum, eds. Ulysses: En-Gendered Perspectives. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1999. 384 pp. $55.00. Paper: $29.95. The best readers of James Joyce's Ulysses celebrate its resistance to critical cartography...

Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Julian W. Connolly, ed. Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999. 249 pp. $60.00. In his introduction to this intriguing, necessary collection of eleven essays, Connolly quotes one of Nabokov's "strong...

Alasdair Gray.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Stephen Bernstien. Alasdair Gray. Associated Univ. Presses, 1999. 187 pp. $39.95. Not unthankfully, Stephen Bernstein's work on Alasdair Gray is a book that should be on every American's bookshelf. In a concise, laconic manner--well...

Books Received.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Alexis, Andre. Despair and Other Stories. Holt, 2000. $23.00. (F) Ali, Tariq. The Book of Saladin. Verso, 1999. Paper: $15.00. (F) --. Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree. Verso, 1999. Paper: No Price Given. (F) Allende, Isabel....