The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from March 2004

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from March 2004

Douglas Glover.
March 22, 2004... Douglas Glover's characters are a persecuted lot. They suffer from cracked skulls, diseased lungs, digital amputations (both elective and compulsory), aesthetic constipation, nymphomania, toothache, chronic masturbation, amnesia, Kierkegaardian...

Blaise Cendrars.
March 22, 2004... I refuse to contribute to contemporary Parisian journals. They are too corny, too old-fashioned.... I don't want to be part of the gang. I am not behind, as you say, but ahead.... I have seen a few modern foreign journals. It all belongs to...

Severo Sarduy.
March 22, 2004... For my parents The question as to how one should approach a difficult work of literature begs a series of questions, one of which is: What, if anything, constitutes a "difficult" work? The American composer Roger Sessions attempted to...

Yuri Druzhnikov. Angels on the Head of a Pin.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Trans. Thomas Moore. Peter Owen/Dufour, 2003. 566 pp. $34.95. This stunning work of genius led to Druzhnikov's being blacklisted for his mocking depiction of the return of the cult of personality to the Soviet Union after Khrushchev,...

Han Shaogong. A Dictionary of Maqiao.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Trans. Julia Lovell. Columbia Univ. Press, 2003. 322 pp. $27.95. The premise of this "dictionary" is that the local peculiarities of language usage reveal the outlook and way of life of a tiny remote village in southern China. This...

Leslie Scalapino. Dahlia's Iris: Secret Autobiography and Fiction.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... FC2, 2003. 213 pp. Paper: $13.95; Zither & Autobiography. Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2003. 110 pp. $30.00; paper: $14.95. Leslie Scalapino has long wrestled with the implications (indeed, the illusion) of the moment. Her avant-garde...

Marcel Benabou. L'Appentis revisite.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Berg International, Paris, 2003. 93 pp. 9.00 [euro]. Marcel Benabou's latest book is a collection of short pieces, nine of them in all. Readers who have come under the heady sway of his longer works will not be disappointed here, for...

Alexandra Papaditsas and Kent Johnson. The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Skanky Possum (www.skankypossum.com), 2003.56 pp. Paper: $7.00. Deep in the dark wilds of unlikely Culver City, CA, hides the Museum of Jurassic Technology, wherein fantasy and half-learned history commingle to reveal that either we know...

Jorge Amado. Tent of Miracles.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Trans. Barbara Shelby Merello. Intro. Ilan Stavans. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2003. 380 pp. Paper: $16.95; Tieta. Trans. Barbara Shelby Merello. Intro. Moacyr Scliar. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2003. 671 pp. Paper: $18.95. (Reprints) Timed...

Wilson Harris. The Mask of the Beggar.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Faber & Faber, 2003. 172 pp. 16.99 [pounds sterling]. The Mask of the Beggar, Wilson Harris's twenty-fourth novel, can be read as a recapitulation of what he has been voicing (in that peculiarly personal rhythm of his prose) in all of his...

Lyn Hejinian. The Fatalist.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Omnidawn, 2003.84 pp. Paper: $12.95. The Fatalist belongs to a category of Lyn Hejinian's book-length collage poems-along with works such as Happiness and Slowly--that take as their title a one-word concept and proceed to use this concept...

Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts, eds. The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Night Shade, 2003. 297 pp. $24.00. Composing a work of fiction within the vocabulary and form of a nonfiction genre can be a powerful way to fuse the exploratory nature of imaginative writing with the concerns of the world outside the book....

Peter Carey. My Life as a Fake.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Knopf, 2003. 266 pp. $24.00. The title alerts us to the art of fakery (or the fakery of art). When the narrator, Sarah Wode-Douglass, tries to find material for her literary magazine, the Modern Review, she becomes obsessed with the poetry...

Angelica Gorodischer. Kalpa Imperial: the Greatest Empire that Never Was.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Trans. Ursula K. Le Guin. Small Beer, 2003. 246 pp. Paper: $16.00. In Kalpa Imperial an imaginary world is described through a series of short stories told by a "storyteller." This nameless narrator is the one constant force through the...

Gerald Vizenor. Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2003. 208 pp. $26.95. Gerald Vizenor contributes to Nebraska's Native Storiers series a novel that challenges conventional notions of ethnic, cultural, and stylistic purity. The title means, roughly, "Hiroshima...

Q Synopsis. Johnny Werd: the Fire Continues.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Spineless, 2003. 124 pp. $19.95; paper: $9.95. Every generation reinvents Holden Caulfield, the misfit resisting the onset of complacency and banality, the lost cause locked on pause, shadowed too early by the absurdity of inevitable...

Christine Schutt. Florida.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... TriQuarterly Books, 2003. 152 pp. $22.95. Florida is Christine Schutt's second book (the first being the astounding story-collection Nightwork) and her first novel. At the heart of the book is Alice Fivey, left fatherless at a young age and...

Laird Hunt. Indiana, Indiana.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Coffee House, 2003. 204 pp. $20.00. At first glance Laird Hunt's second novel seems very different from his debut, The Impossibly. Whereas the first was set in various unnamed European cities, this novel takes place in the American rural...

Lara Stapleton and Veronica Gonzalez, eds. Juncture: 25 Very Good Stories and 12 Excellent Drawings.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Soft Skull, 2003. 280 pp. Paper: $18.95. Teachers of creative writing on the lookout for an anthology that assembles experimental work by pioneering writers in that field will be excited by Juncture. Concentrating on authors who have...

Renee Gladman. The Activist.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Krupskaya, 2003. 145 pp. Paper: $11.00. A haunting and hilarious mix of dreams, news reports, confessions, and internal monologues, Renee Gladman's latest book is an absurdist political satire and a poetic consideration of points of...

Jincy Willett. Winner of the National Book Award.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Dunne/St. Martin's, 2003. 323 pp. $23.95. Bookish Dorcas, middle-aged, with a lifelong disinterest in the carnal, weathers a Rhode Island hurricane in the library where she works by drinking spiked coffee and reading In the Driver's Seat:...

Aaron Zimmerman. By the Time You Finish This Book You Might Be Dead: Changing and Improving Your Life through CUTLAS by Eliot Greebee.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Spuyten Duyvil, 2003. 250 pp. Paper: $13.00. "Under normal circumstances, I have no doubt that my ability to consume anything far exceeds that of anyone else I encounter. After all, I've built my entire life's work around such practices."...

Joao de Melo. My World Is Not of This Kingdom.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Trans. Gregory Rabassa. Aliform, 2003. 248 pp. Paper: $15.95. The Azores may "exist to most Americans only as mid-Atlantic flecks on a map," as Katherine Vaz puts it in her introduction to My World Is Not of This Kingdom, but the tiny...

Andrew Lewis Conn. P. Soft Skull.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... 2003. 365 pp. Paper: $15.00. Often, first-time novelists are encumbered by extravagant praise that doesn't allow room for them to grow or to make errors. Similarly, readers' expectations are dictated by selective blurbs. So ignore the gush...

Gustaw Herling. The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Trans. Bill Johnston. New Directions, 2003. 281 pp. $25.95. In his last collection of stories Gustaw Herling speaks in the voice of a Polish writer like himself, resident in Naples after World War II, unfolding signal events in the lives of...

Glen Duncan. I, Lucifer.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Grove, 2003. 262 pp. Paper: $13.00. In I, Lucifer Satan has been given one last chance for forgiveness. After spending a month in corporeal form, the Prince of Darkness will be given the choice to exit the body and return to hell or to...

Knut Hamsun. The Last Joy.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Trans. Sverre Lyngstad. Green Integer, 2003. 279 pp. Paper: $12.95. In Sverre Lyngstad's new translation of Knut Hamsun's 1912 novel, a fiftyish narrator leaves the isolation of his idyllic forest retreat for an alpine tourist resort, where...

Harry Mulisch. Siegfried.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Trans. Paul Vincent. Viking, 2003. 180 pp. $22.95. In the past Mulisch has posed ontological questions that border on the ludicrous in their enormity, then proceeded to answer them successfully through his clever and munificent fictions. In...

Lyonel Trouillot. Street of Lost Footsteps.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Trans. and intro. Linda Coverdale. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2003. 115 pp. $45.00; paper: $16.95. Trouillot's book has three narrators. These include a militant taxi-driver and a poetic retired brothel-keeper. But the middle one, in age and...

Moacyr Scliar. The Centaur in the Garden.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Trans. Margaret A. Neves. Intro. Ilan Stavans. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2003. 216 pp. Paper: $15.95. (Reprint) First published in 1980 as O Centauro no jardin and translated in 1984, The Centaur in the Garden is clearly a work of what's...

Dallas Wiebe. The Vox Populi Street Stories.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Burning Deck, 2003. 308 pp. Paper: $15.00. When Gottlieb Otto Liebgott, the narrator of Dallas Wiebe's collection The Vox Populi Street Stories, announces his intention to chronicle the activities of Dallasandro Vibini, private investigator...

Robert Bolano. By Night in Chile.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Trans. Chris Andrews. New Directions, 2003. 130 pp. Paper: $13.95. Considered one of Chile's best writers, Robert Bolano published nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry before his death in July 2003. Aside from a...

Christian Bok, ed. Ground Works: Avant-Garde for Thee.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Intro. Margaret Atwood. House of Anansi, 2002. 236 pp. $28.95; paper: $18.95. In the last few decades mainstream literature has been quite successful in incorporating various innovations that were first tried out in experimental fiction,...

Dmitry Bakin. Reasons for Living.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Trans. Andrew Bromfield. Granta, 2002. 143 pp. Paper: $14.95. Winner of the 1996 Anti-Booker prize, Dmitry Bakin's first collection, Reasons for Living, presents a melange of fabulism and estranged realism. In the grim, postwar folktale...

Pavol Hudik, ed. In Search of Homo Sapiens: Twenty-Five Contemporary Slovak Short Stories.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Trans. Heather Trebaticka. Bolchazy-Carducci/The Publishing House of the Slovak Writers Society, 2002. 264 pp. Paper: $29.95. These fine stories, most written over the last two decades, culled from a body of literature largely unknown to...

Corey Mesler. Talk: a Novel in Dialogue.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Livingston, 2002. 208 pp. $27.00; paper: $14.00. As its title suggests, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue is both written entirely in dialogue and concerned with establishing a meaningful "dialogue with the world." Unlike the rollicking, maximalist...

James McCourt. Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985: Excursions in the Mind of the Life.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Norton, 2004. 577 pp. $29.95. Although this "extravagant edifice" (Harold Bloom's words) will probably be classified as a gay-studies text, it deserves to stand alone. McCourt gives us an autobiography, a social history, a critical...

Ulla E. Dydo with William Rice. Gertrude Stein: the Language that Rises: 1923-1934.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Northwestern Univ. Press, 2003. 686 pp. $49.95; Steven Meyer. Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science. Stanford Univ. Press, 2001. 450 pp. $65.00; paper: $24.95. These two valuable studies seem to...

Gaddis. Fiction Jones.(Sound Recording Review)
March 22, 2004... Gaddis. Fiction Jones. 2003. 51 min. CD: $10.00 postpaid (c/o Ed Mish, 621 Emerson St., Madison, WI 53715; www.gaddis.us). The nexus of music and literature has seemed rife with creative possibilities from the very start--lots of the early...

Books received.
March 22, 2004... Abrams, Sam. The Old Pothead Poems. Creative Arts, 2003. Paper: $15.00. (P) Adler, Frances Payne. The Making of a Matriot: Poetry and Prose 1991-2003. Red Hen, 2003. Paper: $13.95. (P) Alexander, Goldie. Body and Soul. Indra, 2003....