The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from March 2005

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from March 2005

Gert Jonke.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2005... At first glance, the career of Austrian novelist and dramatist Gert Jonke presents a story of unclouded acclaim. Critics praised his first longer work, Geometric Regional Novel (Geometrischer Heimatroman, 1969), as a virtuosic achievement in...

Heaven Street--Earth Mound Square: two chapters.(English translation of Gert Jonke's fabulated autobiography)(Excerpt)
March 22, 2005... Translator's Note The pieces presented here in first English translations are the third-last and second-last chapters of Gert Jonke's wildly fabulated autobiography and willfully idiosyncratic guidebook called HimmelstraBe--Erdbrustplatz...

Kazuo Ishiguro.
March 22, 2005... "I sometimes feel that if I had written a book like Kafka's Trial, people would say to me, 'What a strange judicial system the Japanese have.'" --Kazuo Ishiguro, qtd. in Bryson 44 In a discussion of the professional restrictions...

Emily Holmes Coleman.
March 22, 2005... Emily Holmes Coleman was a woman of many talents and a prolific writer. She is perhaps best known for her 1930 autobiographical novel, The Shutter of Snow, a fictional rendering of a woman's experience and treatment of postpartum psychosis. The...

Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go. Knopf, 2005. 287 pp. $24.00. Never Let Me Go begins at Hailsham, a serene but unusual private school in the English countryside. There Kathy H., the narrator, grows up with her two closest friends, Tommy and...

Blaise Cendrars. Moravagine.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Blaise Cendrars. Moravagine. Trans. Alan Brown. Intro. Paul La Farge. New York Review, 2004. 229 pp. Paper: $14.00. Seventy-eight years after its initial publication, the second novel by Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) remains a gripping...

James Kelman. You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... James Kelman. You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free. Harcourt, 2004. 410 pp. $25.00. After the Kafkaesque departure of Translated Accounts (2001), James Kehnan's latest novel returns to the frantic, desultory, and orthographically...

Witold Gombrowicz. Bacacay.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Witold Gombrowicz. Bacacay. Trans. Bill Johnston. Archipelago, 2004. 275 pp. $26.00. The last of Gombrowicz's books to appear in Poland in his lifetime, Bacacay includes the collection of seven stories that established his reputation, two...

Rene Daumal. Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidian and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Rene Daumal. Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidian and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures. Trans. Carol Cosman. Intro. Kathleen Ferrick Rosenblatt. Afterword Vera Daumal. Tusk Ivories, 2004. 119 pp. Paper: $14.95. If you're...

Doug Nufer. Negativeland.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Doug Nufer. Negativeland. Autonomedia. 2004. 186 pp. Paper: $9.95. Ken Honochick is both character and experiment. The winner of two gold medals in backstroke swimming at the cursed Munich Games, Honochick spends the next decade trying to...

Haruki Murakami. Kafka on the Shore.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Haruki Murakami. Kafka on the Shore. Trans. Philip Gabriel. Knopf, 2005. 436 pp. $25.95. In Amerika Franz Kafka, who never saw the sea, located Oklahoma on the shore of the Pacific. Haruki Murakami locates Kafka in his Pacific Rim...

Paul Fattaruso. Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Paul Fattaruso. Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf. Soft Skull, 2004. 114 pp. Paper: $11.95. Fattaruso's first novel has a lot to offer--funny "flat" dialogue, oddly specific detail ("The cold froze the inside of his nose hard like a...

Enrique Vila-Matas. Bartleby & Co.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Enrique Vila-Matas. Bartleby & Co. Trans. Jonathan Dunne. New Directions, 2004. 178 pp. $22.95. As he implies in the opening sentence--"I never had much luck with women"--the protagonist/narrator of Vila-Matas's first book to be translated...

Stewart Home. Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Stewart Home. Down & Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton. Do-Not Press, 2004. 201 pp. Paper: 7.99 [pounds sterling]. Down & Out is a whole new step for Stewart Home: not forward or back, but straight out into the wild blue. His usual modus is to...

Didier van Cauwelaert. Out of My Head.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Didier van Cauwelaert. Out of My Head. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Other Press, 2004. 164 pp. $18.00. Submitted for your approval, Martin Harris. For all its cheesy campiness, The Twilight Zone terrifies; voyeurs, we watch as the hapless...

Alan Singer. Dirtmouth.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Alan Singer. Dirtmouth. FC2, 2004. 240 pp. Paper: $15.95. In Alan Singer's fourth novel, Dirtmouth, an anonymous investigator listens to the self-serving testimonies of Kraft Dundeed, a corpulent and abrasive archeologist, and Roscoe Taste,...

Roberto Bolano. Distant Star.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Roberto Bolano. Distant Star. Trans. Chris Andrews. New Directions, 2004. 149 pp. Paper: $14.95. The seed of this, Bolano's second novel to be translated into English, can be found in his earlier work, La Literatura Nazi en America (Nazi...

Alexander Kluge. The Devil's Blind Spot: Tales from the New Century.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Alexander Kluge. The Devil's Blind Spot: Tales from the New Century. Trans. Martin Chalmers and Michael Hulse. New Directions, 2004. 322 pp. $25.95. This book is difficult to analyze but we must try to be alert to its design. Once we...

Jean Genet. The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Jean Genet. The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews. Trans. Jeff Fort. Ed. Albert Dichy. Stanford Univ. Press, 2004. 384 pp. Paper: $24.95. First Genet was a poet. Then he was a novelist. After that he became a playwright. And finally he...

Ingeborg Bachmann. Letters to Felician.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Ingeborg Bachmann. Letters to Felician. Ed. and trans. Damion Searls. Green Integer, 2004. 95 pp. Paper: $9.95. These letters were written in 1945 when Ingeborg Bachmann was nineteen, and they stand under the sign of fascism (as Theodor...

Books received.
March 22, 2005... Abani, Chris. Dog Woman. Red Hen, 2004. Paper: $14.95. (P) Ames, Brian. Eighty-Sixed: A Compendium of the Hapless. Word Riot, 2004. Paper: $11.00. (F) Arjourni, Jakob. Idiots: Five Fairy Tales and Other Stories. Trans. Anthea Bell....