The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from March 2002

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from March 2002

B. S. Johnson.
March 22, 2002... Prologue Writing from 1959, at the age of twenty-six, until his suicide in 1973, B. S. Johnson completed seven experimentally and ideologically intriguing novels. (1) They prefigure by over twenty years the recent phase of critically...

Italo Calvino.
March 22, 2002... When Italo Calvino died in 1985 at the age of sixty-two, he was working on a series of six essays to be delivered at Harvard University under the auspices of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Calvino completed only five of the essays, which...

Ursule Molinaro.
March 22, 2002... On 10 July 2000 the writer Ursule Molinaro passed away at her home in downtown Manhattan. She had been bedridden for about two weeks after a traumatic stay in hospital, against her will. Aside from numerous manuscripts, literary magazines, and...

Why speak Ill of the surface? Only the void has none.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Even though the word is said to have been with us since the beginning, it has as bad a reputation as the biblical serpent. When a thought is expressed inadequately, or an image poorly rendered, it is the word that gets blamed, not the...

John Barth. Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative.
March 22, 2002... Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 396 pp. $26.00. Coming Soon!!! opens with a variation on the classic message-in-a-bottle motif employed by Barth throughout his career: the discovery by Ditsy, a transgendered progger, of a computer disk,...

Alfredo Bryce Echenique. Tarzan's Tonsillitis.
March 22, 2002... Trans. Alfred MacAdam. Pantheon, 2001. 262 pp. $23.00. Though a good portion of it is narrated through letters, Tarzan's Tonsillitis is much more one man's Bernhardian rambling monologue than epistolary love story. Its narrator would have...

Mario Vargas Llosa. The Feast of the Goat.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Trans. Edith Grossman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 404 pp. $25.00. According to Mario Vargas Llosa, good fiction makes people uneasy. By that standard, his Feast of the Goat is a masterpiece, both to the degree it is sure to make...

William T. Vollmann. Argall.
March 22, 2002... Viking, 2001. 746 pp. $40.00. Argall, to grossly simplify matters, is the story of two widely known and wildly embellished historical figures, Pocahontas and Captain John Smith, and the less well known Captain Samuel Argall. This main...

Laird Hunt. The Impossibly.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Coffee House, 2001. 205 pp. $23.95. One of the joys of book reviewing is the delight of coming across a brilliant book one might not normally read; one of the difficulties is trying to convey one's enthusiasm without sounding too much the...

Jonathan Franzen. The Corrections.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 568 pp. $26.00. For Jonathan Franzen, a writer who has been lambasted by Oprah's minions as too highbrow, too artsy, it must be ironic that the central event of his new novel is a traditional Christmas dinner...

Marcel Benabou. Dump This Book While You Still Can!(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Trans. Steven Rendall. Intro. Warren Motte. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2001. 177 pp. Paper: $19.95. Marcel Benabou (Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books) deserves a prize for creating some of the most intriguing titles of the past fifty...

Nathaniel Mackey. Atet A.D.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... City Lights, 2001. 184 pp. Paper: $13.95. Do you remember how, back in those days, when everyone was partying real heavy, there were always a few cats who weren't puttin' the eye on the caboodles, who weren't mainlining the beer from the...

Karoly Pap. Azarel.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Trans. Paul Olchvary. Steerforth, 2001. 219 pp. Paper: $14.00. Though Karoly Pap, laborer, actor and writer, "disappeared" into Bergen-Belsen sometime in 1944, we can count ourselves fortunate that the novel Azarel survived. Pap never...

Andrei Makine. Requiem for a Lost Empire.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Trans. Geoffrey Strachan. Arcade, 2001. 252 pp. $24.95. Makine's latest novel is a terminal tour of the violent episodes endured by Russia in the twentieth century. A saga that spans three generations of Russian soldiers, Requiem maintains...

Kate Bernheimer. The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... FC2, 2001. 192 pp. Paper: $11.95. The tales in The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, Kate Bernheimer's intriguing first novel, are the stories Ketzia tells about herself as child and adult and the stories an omniscient narrator tells about...

Curt Leviant. Diary of an Adulterous Woman.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Syracuse Univ. Press, 2001. 500 pp. $29.95. In addition to the main text of the novel, there is an odd "ABC Directory that offers alphabetical tidbits and surprises." (This "Directory" is 111 pages.) Leviant plays with the notion of novels...

Elizabeth Knox. Black Oxen.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 436 pp. $25.00. At a moment when we may be tiring of the infinite jestings of postmodern mock-epics, Elizabeth Knox reminds us of their rich satisfactions--call it narrative therapy, a treatment her central...

Dennis Bock. The Ash Garden.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Knopf, 2001. 281 pp. $23.00. The Ash Garden brings together three characters very much products of World War II, its dislocations and violence. Two women, Emiko Amai and Sophie Boll, child survivors of Hiroshima and Linz, live lives of...

Iain Sinclair. Landor's Tower.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Granta, 2001. 345 pp. $24.95. No one writes like Iain Sinclair. First, there's the idiosyncrasy of his preoccupations, among which one might list obscure genre writers, the history and character of London, Jack the Ripper, draw-blood...

Jim Crace. The Devil's Larder.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 165 pp. $20.00. The Devil's Larder is a collection of sixty-four very short stories--the longest several pages, the shortest just two words--having to do with cooking and eating all sorts of food, from...

Bruce Olds. Bucking the Tiger.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 371 pp. $25.00. Bruce Olds's second novel follows his successful debut several years back, Raising Holy Hell, a fictionalized account of the life of John Brown. Olds assembled that first book from scraps of...

Dick Wimmer. Irish Wine: The Trilogy.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Penguin, 2001. 330 pp. Paper: $13.00. Irish Wine is an exuberant romp through Ireland, Britain, and the United States. It is part Candide, part Ginger Man, and part At Swim-Two-Birds in its wild pacing, its zany collection of misfits, and...

Edouard Glissant. The Fourth Century.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Edouard Glissant. The Fourth Century. Trans. Betsy Wing. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2001. 294 pp. Paper: $20.00. The Fourth Century opens as young Mathieu Beluse, seeking guidance from Papa Longoue, a quimboiseur, asks him to "tell [him]...

Martin Nakell. Two Fields That Face and Mirror Each Other.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Green Integer, 2001. 287 pp. Paper: $16.95. The phrase novel of ideas doesn't exactly apply to Martin Nakell's thoughtful Two Fields That Face and Mirror Each Other because of the nineteenth-century baggage evoked by the term. And yet some...

Elizabeth McCracken. Niagara Falls All Over Again.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Dial, 2001. 308 pp. $23.95. McCracken presents a quirky love story between two physically mismatched misfits: Rocky Carter, fat funny man, and his comedy partner Mike (ne Mose) Sharp--Abbott to Mr. Carter's Costello. The tale of their rise...

Arnost Lustig. The Bitter Smell of Almonds: Selected Fiction.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Trans. Vera Borkovec, et al. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2001. 724 pp. Paper: $25.95. The fiction of Arnost Lustig currently in English translation is gathered in two collections of stories, Street of Lost Brothers and Indecent Dreams; a...

Monica Lavin, ed. Points of Departure: New Stories from Mexico.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Trans. Gustavo V. Segade. City Lights, 2001. 159 pp. Paper: $15.95. This collection of seventeen short stories brings together Mexican writers born in the fifties and sixties, many of whom have never been translated into English. The...

Erika Krouse. Come Up and See Me Sometime.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Scribner, 2001. 202 pp. $22.00. The characters populating Erika Krouse's first book are in many respects similar to the now-familiar thirtysomething denizens of popular culture: youngish but consciously aging; cynical but in love; hungry...

Allan Gurganus. The Practical Heart: Four Novellas.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Knopf, 2001. 322 pp. $25.00. These novellas remind me of James's ghostly narrative "The Jolly Corner," which explores similar convolutions of art, sexuality, and duplicity. They feature subtle explorations of sexuality and childhood; their...

Robert Buckeye. Pressure Drop.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Amandla Publishing (Box 431, East Middlebury, VT 05740), 2001. 71 pp. Paper: $15.00. "Buckeye," the constructed persona of the author in this dreamy, philosophical, sexy pressure-dropping novel, finds his way from Vermont to Vieques--less...

Karen Tei Yamashita. Circle K Cycles.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Coffee House, 2001. 147 pp. Paper: $16.95. This collection mixes short story with essay, diary with advertisement, and photograph with recipe, for an intriguing blend that mirrors the lives of its fragmented subjects. Yamashita's visually...

Mempo Giardinelli. The Tenth Circle.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Mempo Giardinelli. The Tenth Circle. Trans. Andrea G. Labinger. Latin American Literary Review Press, 2001. 93 pp. Paper: $13.95. Mempo Giardinelli's The Tenth Circle is a fast-paced survey of an adulterous couple's fall. The quick first...

Manuel Rivas. The Carpenter's Pencil.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Overlook, 2001. 166 pp. $24.95. This is the story of Dr. Daniel Da Barca, a Republican doctor in the Civil War, who fought against Franco and survived his prisons. It is begun by a journalist who has been assigned by his paper to write...

Ivy Goodman. A Chapter from Her Upbringing.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, 2001. 223 pp. Paper: $15.95. In a world in which almost anything can happen, and in which almost anything can be imagined and any imagining publicized as rumor or fact, it is fascinating that human emotions...

Suhayl Saadi. The Burning Mirror.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Polygon, 2001. 240 pp. Paper: 9.99 [pounds sterling]. Polygon--the paperback imprint of Edinburgh University Press, distributed in the United States by Columbia University Press--publishes an interesting series of Scottish fiction. Many of...

Antony Polonsky and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, eds. Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland: An Anthology.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland: An Anthology. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2001. 349 pp. $60.00. The third volume in Nebraska's Jewish Writing in the Contemporary World series, Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland gathers stories and...

Frank Lentricchia. Lucchesi and The Whale.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Duke Univ. Press, 2001. 115 pp. $17.95. The belly of Frank Lentricchia's Lucchesi and The Whale is a thirty-five-page meditation on Moby-Dick. Surrounding this are several brief scenarios in the life, career, and fantasies of one Thomas...

Micheline Aharonian Marcom. Three Apples Fell from Heaven.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Riverhead, 2001. 270 pp. $23.95. In words cheapened by their appearance on the jackets of a thousand and one mediocre books, but necessary here: This is an impressive work dealing with family, memory, and loss. Three Apples Fell from Heaven...

David Albahari. Bait.
March 22, 2002... Trans. Peter Agnone. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2001. 117 pp. Paper: $14.95. In Bait, a poet in exile imagines a story he might write, if he were a writer. Recalling his early life in postwar Yugoslavia while sitting in a restaurant on an...

Brady Udall. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Norton, 2001. 423 pp. $24.95. The eponymous protagonist of Brady Udall's first novel possesses the uncanny ability to survive above all else. The very first line of the book, narrated by Edgar, sets its morosely droll tone: "If I could...

Sonia Rivera-Valdes. The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Trans. Dick Cluster, et al. Seven Stories, 2001. 158 pp. $21.95. Rivera-Valdes has been praised as one of the most important writers of Cuban descent, and this collection won her the 1997 Casa de las Americas award for short fiction. These...

A. L. Kennedy. Everything You Need.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Knopf, 2001. 543 pp. $25.95. A. L. Kennedy's beguiling tale of love and loss unfolds off the Welsh coast on Foal Island, an isolated writers' colony with a bizarre suicide credo. Nathan Staples, a wildly successful and misanthropic horror...

Bernhard Schlink. Flights of Love.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Pantheon, 2001. 308 pp. $23.00. The author of the best-selling The Reader returns with a collection of seven stories vaguely linked by notions of connection and love. The stories themselves, though largely traditional in feel and in their...

Yehoshua Kenaz. Returning Lost Loves.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Steerforth, 2001. 263 pp. Paper: $14.00. Alienation runs like a wild animal through Kenaz's apartment-jungle in Tel Aviv. Each character lives beside rather than with his or her partner, and, just as parallel lines never meet, there is no...

Dagoberto Gilb. Woodcuts of Women.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Grove, 2001. 167 pp. $23.00. With Woodcuts of Women, Dagoberto Gilb builds on and broadens his storytelling repertoire, which also includes The Magic of Blood, stories, and The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna, a novel. The ten stories...

Richard Klein. Jewelry Talks.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Pantheon, 2001.227 pp. $25.00. The narrator of Richard Klein's Jewelry Talks takes both his title and his project from Diderot's Les bijoux indiscrets. But whereas that earlier book uses jewelry as a metaphor for sex, Klein's narrator...

Gertrude Stein. To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Green Integer, 2001. 144 pp. Paper: $9.95. Gertrude Stein intended to publish To Do as a children's book, but because it seemed to lack narrative interest, it remained unpublished until 1957. I believe children would love the sonically...

Luigi Pirandello. Her Husband.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Trans. Martha King and Mary Ann Frese Witt. Duke Univ. Press, 2000. 242 pp. $24.95. Before writing his award-winning plays, Luigi Pirandello began his career writing fiction. His fifth novel, Her Husband, written in 1908 and published in...

Jeff Noon. Cobralingus.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Codex, 2001. 120 pp. Paper: $14.95. Jeff Noon first came to the public's attention as Britain's first cyberpunk with the surrealist science fiction novel Vurt, in which desperate urban dwellers enter a virtual world by sucking on feathers....

Witold Gombrowicz. Ferdydurke.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Trans. Danuta Borchardt. Foreword Susan Sontag. Yale Univ. Press, 2000. 281 pp. Paper: $14.95. This new edition of Ferdydurke marks the first Polish-to-English translation of Gombrowicz's novel, originally published in 1937, and the...

Steven Kotler. The Angle Quickest for Flight.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001. 443 pp. Paper: $15.95. After a successful run in hardcover, Steven Kotler's first novel, The Angle Quickest for Flight, has been reissued in paperback. Kotler's management of language and structure is...

Roberto Calasso. Literature and the Gods.
March 22, 2002... Trans. Tim Parks. Knopf, 2001. 212pp. $22.00; The Forty-nine Steps. Trans. John Shepley. Univ. of Minnesota, 2001.290pp. $29.95. Roberto Calasso is one of the most learned and daring voices on the global literary scene. Because of his...

Paul West. Master Class: Scenes from a Fiction Workshop.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Harcourt, 2001. 259 pp. $24.00. In many ways, Master Class is an unprecedented book. Indeed, there are Festschrifts and memoirs galore from tyros acknowledging a mentor, but a tribute--and such an affectionate tribute--from a mentor is...

Stephane Mallarme. Mallarme in Prose.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Trans. Jill Anderson, et al. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. New Directions, 2001. 152 pp. Paper: $14.95. La Derniere Mode (The Latest Fashion) was the title of the magazine that Mallarme edited in which he wrote everything in each issue under...

Czeslaw Milosz. Milosz's ABC's.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001.313 pp. $24.00. In Polish culture an ABC is a genre of short prose pieces arranged alphabetically, a hybrid form that includes memoir, essay, and anecdote. Often the title only gives a partial hint of the...

J.M. Coetzee. Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986-1999.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Viking, 2001. 295 pp. $24.95. Truly skeptical writing--prose that is thoughtful and inquisitive even while it doubts and questions cultural certainties--is rare in our age of critical carping, finger-pointing, and one-upmanship. Stranger...

Philip Roth. Shop Talk.
March 22, 2002... Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 160 pp. $23.00. In some ways Shop Talk is a misleading title, suggesting detailed discussions about the minutiae of fictional composition and inspiration. Instead, Roth discusses Kafka, Bruno Schulz, and Judaism, as...

Books received.(Bibliography)
March 22, 2002... Abe, Kobo. The Ruined Map. Trans. E. Dale Saunders. Vintage, 2001. Paper: $13.00. (F) Allen, Jack. Change of Heart. Burping Frog, 2001. Paper: $14.00. (F) Al-Shaykh, Hanan. Only in London. Trans. Catherine Cobham. Pantheon, 2001....