The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from March 2003

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from March 2003

Editor's note.(Editorial)
March 22, 2003... This special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction offers a casebook on Gilbert Sorrentino's 1971 novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Guest editor David Andrews has gathered a group of essays that offer different interpretive...

Of love, scorn, and contradiction: an interpretive overview of Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things.
March 22, 2003... Gilbert Sorrentino has said that Edward Dahlberg "exists as an enormous, stubborn giant of American letters," who, because of his obstinacy, is "largely unread" (Something 99). He might, of course, have said the same of himself, and, more...

Fictional truths: imaginative qualities of actual things between image and language.
March 22, 2003... Not a just image, just an image.--Jean-Luc Godard Already with its puzzling title, Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things poses the question of the relations between two categories of being: those qualified as...

Gilbert Sorrentino's problematic middle child: Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things.
March 22, 2003... The chocolate was real, the lard was melted, and the vomit that was meant to represent The Sweet and Pungent Smell of Success had no smell at all because it was plastic. To prevent the lesson of this last model from being lost on the bewildered...

Matter into imagination: the cognitive realism of Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things.
March 22, 2003... The Cognitive Dance The book for a time enjoyed some notoriety as a roman a clef. It made enemies, it caused a stir, and it was then largely forgotten as the living models for the characters, like the author himself, left the scene. It was...

Gilbert Sorrentino: cataloging the Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things.
March 22, 2003... Sorrentino's playful novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things confronts the paradoxical qualities of fiction and interrogates the complex (and dynamic) relationship between truth and fiction peculiar to the genre of the novel. As with all...

Selected critical bibliography: interviews, reviews, and articles on Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things.
March 22, 2003... Andrews, David. "The Art Is the Act of Smashing the Mirror: A Conversation with Gilbert Sorrentino." Review of Contemporary Fiction 21.3 (2001): 60-68. --. "Conclusion: Aestheticism in American Literature, Part III: From Williams to...

A Gilbert Sorrentino checklist.
March 22, 2003... Fiction The Sky Changes. New York: Hill and Wang, 1966. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986; Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. Steelwork. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970; Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992. ...

Interview with Marguerite Young.(Interview)
March 22, 2003... The following dialogue took place when Marguerite Young was hospitalized in June 1993. The exchange moves rapidly between topics of discussion and is sometimes disjointed. Young was ill at the time, but readers will recognize the marvelous and...

Richard Powers. The Time of Our Singing.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. 631 pp. $27.00. For Richard Powers, in fictions that are among the most invigorating and humane of the last fifteen years, art is a place, a sheltering space apart where characters, socially angular to the...

William Gaddis. Agape Agape.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Afterword Joseph Tabbi. Viking, 2002. 113 pp. $23.95. Although anything by William Gaddis is a major literary event, this final work marks his exit with a whimper Not so much a novel, Agape Agape is an inconsistently dramatized monologue...

William Gaddis. The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Ed. Joseph Tabbi. Penguin, 2002. 182 pp. Paper: $14.00. William Gaddis, probably the greatest American author of the past half-century, authored mountains of innovative, satirical fiction that spanned five critically acclaimed novels. He...

Hubert Selby, Jr. Waiting Period.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Marion Boyars, 2002. 197 pp. $22.95. This novel is the extended monologue of a man obsessed with death. He is planning his own suicide, but when a delay occurs in obtaining a gun, he changes purpose and decides to kill those he thinks...

Steven Millhauser. The King in the Tree.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Knopf, 2003.224 pp. $23.00. Steven Millhauser's work has always had a romantic quality about it. His characters are dreamers who revel in the wonderment of imagination or are victimized by their own obsessions. But readers expecting...

Norah Labiner. Miniatures.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Coffee House, 2002.402 pp. $23.00. Following up Our Sometime Sister (2000), Norah Labiner successfully funnels her energies into this marvelously layered novel, which sprints in abecedarian fashion across chapter headings from "Appomattox"...

Camilo Jose Cela. Boxwood.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. Patricia Haugaard. New Directions, 2002.211 pp. $25.95. Like the densely branched and intricately sculpted shrub that Camilo Jose Cela takes for the title of his final novel, Boxwood is a complex adventure that weaves and branches...

Andrei Makine. Music of a Life.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. Geoffrey Strachan. Arcade, 2002. 109 pp. $19.95. Andrei Makine's powerful new novel opens in a provincial train station in the middle of a snowstorm. There, an unnamed narrator finds himself stranded amid a sea of fellow travelers,...

Toure. The Portable Promised Land.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Little, Brown, 2002.256 pp. $23.95. It takes a certain panache, and certainly some talent, to pull off a single name. Not to worry: Toure, the Rolling Stone writer and self-proclaimed tennis champ of the current literary elite, exhibits...

Jose Saramago. The Cave.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. Harcourt, 2002. 307 pp. $25.00. With The Cave Saramago returns again to the novel (his last book was a non-fiction work on Portugal), using the form to provide a critique of capitalism and mall culture, with his...

Maurice Blanchot. Aminadab.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. and intro. Jeff Fort. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2002. 199 pp. Paper: $22.00. It is only within the last ten to fifteen years that Maurice Blanchot's work has found its way into English translation, and he still remains relatively...

Edward Desautels. Flicker in the Porthole Glass.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Mammoth, 2002. 277 pp. Paper: $17.95. Edward Desautels's intriguing first novel offers a disturbing--and eerily riveting--account of the dilemma posed by our cultural addiction to film, how we have been given new license to disregard the...

Jorge Volpi. In Search of Klingsor.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. Kristina Cordero. Scribner, 2002. 414 pp. $26.00. In Search of Klingsor revolves around Francis Bacon, a young American physicist sent to Germany in the aftermath of World War II to investigate inconsistencies in the Nuremberg...

Karin Boye. Kallocain.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. Gustaf Lannestock. Intro. Richard B. Vowles. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2002. 193 pp. Paper: $17.95. The world is more like it is now than it ever was before, Dwight Eisenhower said late in his second term as president, and if that...

Nazim Hikmet. Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. Foreword Edward Hirsch. Persea, 2002. 466 pp. $39.95. Hikmet's massive twentieth-century epic dramatizes in poetic dialogue several extended episodes of a people's fervent struggle for liberty. The...

Murray Bail. Camouflage.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002. 195 pp. $20.00. Australian writer Murray Bail is mainly noted as a novelist, but he's also produced a small body of short fiction that's at last available in the U.S. Camouflage assembles fourteen stories...

Dave Eggers. You Shall Know Our Velocity.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... McSweeney's, 2002. 371 pp. $22.00. Y.S.K.O.V.'s narrative--two guys attempt to travel the world, giving away thousands of guiltily gotten dollars to whomever they decide deserves or needs it--begins on the cover, continues onto the inside...

Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Faire l'amour.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Les Editions de Minuit, 2002. 179 pp. 13.00 [euro]. The first sentence of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's latest novel offers a scene that is chilling enough for anyone: "I had filled a flask with hydrochloric acid, and I always carried it with...

Sam Shepard. Great Dream of Heaven.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Knopf, 2002. 142 pp. $20.00. Although these startling stories demonstrate Shepard's obsessive themes--the broken family, the search for salvation, the edge of hysteria--they should be read as innovative. Shepard is indeed a writer who can...

Blaise Cendrars. To the End of the World.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. Alan Brown. Peter Owen/ Dufour Editions, 2002. 253 pp. Paper: $19.95. Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) had a stimulating and askew view of the world, developed by his life as an adventurer, as a filmmaker, and as a soldier in the First...

Victor Beilis. "The Rehabilitation of Freud" and "Bakhtin and Others.".(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans., intro., and afterword Richard Grose. Other Press, 2002. 127 pp. $20.00. I'm just a casual reader of Russian literature, and yet even I can see that something remarkable was happening in the last years of the Soviet regime. Last...

Gary Lutz. Stories in the Worst Way.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... 3rd Bed, 2002. 152 pp. Paper: $8.00. There is no finer writer of sentences than Gary Lutz; his sentences are both original and sublime. In "Waking Hours," a story about a divorced middle-aged man who is often on the road, the protagonist...

Jerome Charyn. The Isaac Quartet: Blue Eyes, Marilyn the Wild, The Education of Patrick Silver, Secret Isaac.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002. 610 pp. $35.00. Jerome Charyn is a writer of extraordinary power, one of America's great originals. His supercharged language pushes itself and readers almost to the point of hysteria, each sentence carrying...

Juan Goytisolo. State of Siege.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. Helen Lane. City Lights, 2002. 155 pp. Paper: $13.95. Juan Goytisolo's career has moved in an ever-widening circle of cultural excavation and exploration of literary form, becoming more enmeshed in his recurrent themes of exile, war,...

A. M. Homes. Things You Should Know.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... HarperCollins, 2002. 213 pp. $23.95. Many of the characters in A. M. Homes's latest collection of stories are looking for something, often something they seem unable to name. This wanting can reach spectacular heights, and so it's no real...

Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre, eds. Leviathan 3: Libri quosdam ad scientiam, alios ad insaniam deduxere.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Ministry of Whimsy, 2002. 468 pp. Paper: $21.95. This third installment in the Leviathan anthology series bills itself as a showcase of "fantastical fiction." But to get a sense of this anthology, it's more useful to note that the oxymoron...

Frederic Tuten. The Green Hour.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Norton, 2002. 265 pp. $24.95. Frederic Tuten has already given us an ultra-experimental collage-novel (The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, 1971), a telescoped historical biography (Tallien: A Brief Romance, 1988), a political novel...

Jose Carlos Somoza. The Athenian Murders.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. Sonia Soto. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002. 262 pp. $24.00. John Gardner once referred to the novel as a "vivid and continuous dream." Jose Carlos Somoza explores the more unsettling implications of this statement in The Athenian...

Robert Walser. Selected Stories.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. Christopher Middleton, et al. New York Review Books, 2002. 196 pp. Paper: $12.95. Robert Walser's short prose fills fourteen volumes, ten of which he published before permanently entering the sanatorium in which he spent the final...

Gao Xingjian. One Man's Bible.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. Mabel Lee. HarperCollins, 2002. 464 pp. $26.95. Gao Xingjian's newly translated novel is a fictionalization of his life during China's political upheaval in the 1960s and seventies. Readers with little or no knowledge of the Cultural...

Stephen Dixon. I.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... McSweeney's, 2002. 338 pages. $18.00. Characteristically enough for a book published by McSweeney's, Stephen Dixon's fascinating new novel, I., begins on the cover. There, an "I" and an accompanying period have been cut into the cloth and...

Lynn Crawford. Simply Separate People.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Black Square/Hammer, 2002. 183 pp. Paper: $14.00. Lynn Crawford is the sort of writer who is very difficult to pin down; each book feels at once entirely hers but at the same time not like the others. Her first book was a collection of odd,...

Mikhail Epstein. Cries in the New Wilderness: From the Files of the Moscow Institute of Atheism.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. and intro. Eve Adler. Paul Dry Books, 2002. 236 pp. Paper: $15.95. Cries in the New Wilderness does not read like a novel. It purports to reprint an obscure 1985 research study in Soviet political sociology, The New Sectarianism,...

Eckhard Gerdes. Cistern Tawdry.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Fugue State, 2003. Unpaginated. Paper: $18.00. "Language connects. To disconnect, language must be discarded. Freedom cannot result from socialization--only indebtedness can. If you learn a language." Except that the characters in Cistern...

Christian Oster. Dans le train.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Les Editions de Minuit, 2002. 159 pp. 11.90 [euro]. The narrator of Christian Oster's ninth novel, Dans le train (In the Train), is a man with a train to catch. Frank likes taking trains--any train at all; it doesn't matter to him. More...

Ismail Kadare. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. from the French of Jusuf Vrioni by David Bellos. Arcade, 2002. 182 pp. $23.95. In Ismail Kadare's latest novel, Albania awakes from the isolation and terror it experienced under communist dictatorship. But this awakening is...

Thomas Colchie, ed. A Whistler in the Nightworld: Short Fiction from the Latin Americas.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Plume, 2002. 410 pp. Paper: $16.00. As Thomas Colchie points out in his introduction to A Whistler in the Nightworld, one of the defining characteristics of new Latin American literature is its diverse, international nature. It is no...

Joe Ashby Porter. Touch Wood.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Turtle Point, 2002. 192 pages. Paper: $15.95. The ten stories in Joe Ashby Porter's fifth volume of fiction, Touch Wood, read like storybook fables, Gothic fantasy, eighteenth-century travel-journals, picaresque tales of disguise, and...

Carol Emshwiller. The Mount.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Small Beer, 2002. 232 pp. Paper: $16.00. While science fiction has, since its inception as a genre, generally been dominated by commercial publishing houses and the demands of that popular market, there have always been active, scattered...

Yann Martel. Life of Pi.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Harcourt, 2002. 319 pp. $25.00. This ultra-linear novel begins with, and not after, an author's note from which a word is used to summarize travel in India: "bamboozle"--soon put to use at a train station when a clerk claims, "There is no...

Greg Boyd. The Double (Doppelangelganger).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Leaping Dog, 2002. 136 pp. Paper: $14.95. The Double is a book about a reader named Jeff. One of the books he reads is a collection of odd stories (in one, a giant phallus is delivered to a church; in another, a woman shaves her head to...

Arthur Phillips. Prague.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Random House, 2002. 367 pp. $24.95. Prague opens with its main characters not in Prague but in Budapest, seated at a bar and playing a game called "Sincerity," in which players make true and false statements and are then rewarded points...

Dawn Raffel. Carrying the Body.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Scribner, 2002. 126 pp. $18.00. Like the gem at its center, Carrying the Body is a hard, sharp, multifaceted thing. The novel describes the return of a prodigal daughter, Elise, son in tow, to her parents' house, where her sister, called...

Gabe Hudson. Dear Mr. President.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Knopf, 2002. 155 pp. $19.00. Although Hudson has been influenced by the war novels of Vonnegut and Heller, he is not a mere imitator. His first collection is a remarkable weapon; he fights war--however it may be defined--with metaphor and...

Rela Mazali. Maps of Women's Goings and Stayings.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Stanford Univ. Press, 2001. 382 pp. Paper: $24.95. Maps of Women's Goings and Stayings is an in-depth examination of the metaphorical and literal meanings of "a woman's place." The author takes a strongly feminist position in delineating...

Martine Desjardins. Fairy Ring.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. Fred A. Reed and David Homel. Talon, 2001. 223 pp. Paper: $14.95. In Fairy Ring, an epistolary novel set in 1895 Nova Scotia, Clara Weiss, the beleaguered wife of botanist Edmond, suffers from a malaise necessitating a "sleep cure,"...

John Yau. My Heart Is That Eternal Rose Tattoo.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Black Sparrow, 2001. 165 pp. Paper: $17.95. My Heart Is That Eternal Rose Tattoo appeared almost simultaneously with Yau's Borrowed Love Poems, but while that latter book declares its affiliation to poetry in its title, My Heart's...

Christine Brooke-Rose. Invisible Author: Last Essays.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Ohio State Univ. Press, 2002. 206 pp. $45.00. Brooke-Rose takes her title from her experience as a writer; while she has a small group of faithful readers, she reflects on the unhappy idea that nobody seems to have noticed the self-imposed...

Paul Auster. The Red Notebook.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... New Directions, 2002. 103 pp. Paper: $10.95. A recently divorced man recalls his first (and only) true love, a woman he met some twenty years before; three days later she calls him, and they are reunited. A woman doesn't have the money for...

Mario Vargas Llosa. Letters to a Young Novelist.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Trans. Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002. 136 pp. $17.00. In the introduction to Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, the young poet in question, Franz Xaver Kappus, gives a summary of the history of his brief correspondence with...

Paul Metcalf. From Quarry Road: Uncollected Essays and Reviews of Paul Metcalf.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Ed. and intro. Robert Buckeye. Preface Jonathan Williams. Amandla (Box 431, East Middlebury, VT 05740), 2002. 100 pages. $20.00. Metcalf lived on Quarry Road (in Chester, Massachusetts), and the name seems to have suited him well. In...

Joseph Tabbi. Cognitive Fictions.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2002. 166 pp. Paper: $17.95. Like Tabbi's first book, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk, Cognitive Fictions is an interdisciplinary project, building its argument at the...

Joseph Dewey. Understanding Richard Powers.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2002. 176 pp. $29.95. In this excellent introduction to the work of Richard Powers, Joseph Dewey resolutely describes the author of The Gold Bug Variations and seven other "big novels of ideas" as being torn...

Mark Royden Winchell. "Too Good to Be True": The Life and Work of Leslie Fiedler.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Univ. of Missouri Press, 2002. 366 pp. $39.95. Asked to name the most influential American literary critic of the past half-century, one could reasonably reply: "Leslie Fiedler, alas." Fiedler, because of his trenchant, prolific, innovative...

Books received.(Bibliography)
March 22, 2003... Acker, Kathy. Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker. Ed. Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper Intro. Jeanette Winterson. Grove, 2002. Paper: $15.00. (F) --. "Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective" and "The Burning Bombing of America: The...