The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from March 2007

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from March 2007

A short introduction.
March 22, 2007... This will be a short introduction, with a few asides. 1. Why this issue? Simply: selections from a number of Dalkey Archive books that reviewers did not respond well to when first published, or some of the reprints that the Press published...

From Teitlebaum's Window.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... Then in June, 1932, on the second Saturday, a year exactly till Teitlebaum would start in with his signs ("President Roosevelt had a hundred days but you got only till this Monday to enjoy such savings on our Farm Girl pot cheese"), not long...

From Annihilation.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... We are on Listopadowa, the second street crossing Lwowska. In one of the tiny backyards close to the intersection, Mr. Hershe Baum is standing near the house and feeding pigeons perched on his arm. Here they are called Persian butterflies....

From Castle Keep.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... Just before the end of the world Captain Beckman gave us soldiers a lecture on the history of art. I mean, not too long before the Germans broke through in the Ardennes, here was a captain in the American Army telling us about the power, the...

From Chinese Letter.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... I My name is Fritz. Yesterday I had a different name. Today my name is Fritz. I have nothing to say: I'm sitting in my room trying to type a hundred pages or so of my story. It seems nothing is happening. Yet, that's not true. Lots of...

From Chromos.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... A family like that of Coello would be inconceivable except in two places: Spain, where they came from, and New York, where anything goes. This is not intended as a play on words but as a preparation for the incidents preceding the demolition of...

From Flotsam & Jetsam.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... In Denmark every day is different; so say the old books. It's made up of islands, every island different, and a witch on each. There are over 300 of them. I knew one of them once. She lived in Copenhagen, that port up there on Kattegat. We were...

From Geometric Regional Novel.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... The new law is being posted on all barn walls. Striking hammers drive the nails through the paper made from reeds into the wood. When the points of the nails pierce the paper at the edges, the white fibers rustle. There's a hissing before the...

The First Book of Grabinoulor.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... On a shut-in November evening Grabinoulor's feet were sploshing about in the Paris mud and that evening he distressed his shoes no end they were quite astonished at having to plough through such black mud when such white snow was falling for...

From Impossible Object.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... There was once a Christian governor of Cyprus called Bragadino who was a good and holy man and who surrendered to the Turks on the understanding that he would be given his life and freedom. This was at the time of the Crusades, when men fought...

From Billy and Girl.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... Why did the chicken cross the road? Because its mom disappeared and its dad set fire to himself. What that skunk Billy doesn't understand is that pain is not a riddle. It's a mystery because we lack crucial information. Billy's skin is blue. In...

From Mordechai Schamz.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... Mordechai Schamz went to the swimming pool last summer. Upon sighting those practically naked bodies by the waters, he took to thinking--no, it wasn't actually a thought, but rather a feeling, a sensation, more precisely. The sensation took...

From Night.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... I'm looking at the Ikea clock on top of the TV. The television is on, but the sound is off. There are some old women talking about something or other. Or maybe they aren't old. They just have grey hair. And no teeth. I'd look like an old woman...

From Out of Focus.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... I knew that I had been asleep though not for long enough. The eye-sockets had the seared feeling of having been rebored for insertion of red-hot threaded bolts; the carapace of the head burned with the tightness of a metal helmet shrunken on...

From The Queen of the Prisons of Greece.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... APRIL 26, 1974--Many times during the past year, so grim and empty, I have mentioned here my intention of occupying my spare time, of giving it meaning perhaps, by writing what Julia--Julia Marquezim Enone--always so private about herself, told...

From A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... Delivery, with good reason, has been called the most important part of rhetoric. Delivery is the graceful regulation of voice, demeanor, and gesture--a way of creating presence out of air. Only a practiced rule of rhetoric will allow you to...

From Things in the Night.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2007... My Dear, I feel I owe you an explanation. First, I have to admit that I have always been interested in electricity. For the most part I've kept my passion a secret, but have not always been able to avoid temptation, so one or two of my...

Laszlo Krasznahorkai. War and War.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Laszlo Krasznahorkai. War and War. Trans. George Szirtes. New Directions, 2006. 279 pp. Paper: $16.95. Written in 1999, War and War is a bitter but playful parable for our world of permanent emergency: the story of a Hungarian archivist and...

Julien Gracq. Reading Writing.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Julien Gracq. Reading Writing. Trans. Jeanine Herman. Turtle Point Press, 2006. 376 pp. Paper: $17.50. "There is no organized discourse for intimate communication with a book," writes Julien Gracq. This sentiment is echoed throughout...

J. K. Huysmans. Downstream.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2007... J. K. Huysmans. Downstream. Trans. Robert Baldick. Turtle Point Press, 2005. 69 pp. Paper: $10.95. Published in 1882 as "Jean Folantin," Downstream (A vau-l'eau) first appeared in English in 1927. The title informs us that such is the...

Aharon Appelfeld. Katerina.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Aharon Appelfeld. Katerina. Trans. Jeffrey M. Green. Schocken Books, 2006. 212 pp. Paper: $13.00. The Holocaust looms about Aharon Appelfeld's fiction. For forty years, Appelfeld, himself deported to the camps when he was only eight, has...

Hermann Ungar. Boys and Murderers.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Hermann Ungar. Boys & Murderers. Preface by Thomas Mann. Twisted Spoon Press, 2006. 252 pp. Paper: $15.00. If American readers know Czech writer Ungar at all they are likely to know The Maimed, a beautiful and grotesque short novel that...

Helene Cixous. The Day I Wasn't There.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Helene Cixous. The Day I Wasn't There. Trans. Beverly Bie Brahic. Northwestern University Press, 2006. 120 pp. Paper: $19.95. The title refers to the day Cixous' son dies, a Downs Syndrome baby (Cixous uses the older term mongolism), but it...

Michel Houellebecq. The Possibility of an Island.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Michel Houellebecq. The Possibility of an Island. Trans. Gavin Bowd. Knopf, 2006. 337 pp. $24.95. Like its acclaimed predecessor The Elementary Particles (1998), Michel Houellebecq's latest novel projects an evolutionary future in which...

James Chapman. Stet.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2007... James Chapman. Stet. Fugue State Press, 2006. 336 pp. Paper: $16.00. "All of history comes about because of certain people's abilities to change the subject," writes James Chapman in his urgent new novel, Stet. If history is a red herring,...

Rebecca Lee. The City Is a Rising Tide.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Rebecca Lee. The City Is a Rising Tide. Simon & Schuster, 2006. 200 pp. $21.00. The City Is a Rising Tide is a slim debut novel that took Rebecca Lee ten years to hone into its final form. The result of this obviously painstaking effort is...

Marguerite Duras. Yann Andrea Steiner.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Marguerite Duras. Yann Andrea Steiner. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Archipelago Books. 2006. 140 pp. Paper: $15.00. Yann Andrea Steiner is a melange of three stories: 1) the beach and sky, the grey-eyed child, his counselor, the story of the...

Kate Bernheimer. The Complete Tales of Merry Gold.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Kate Bernheimer. The Complete Tales of Merry Gold. FC2, 2006. 177 pp. Paper: $19.95. Kate Bernheimer continues her genre-bending saga of the Gold family with The Complete Tales of Merry Gold, a sequel to her 2002 novel The Complete Tales...

Haruki Murakami. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Haruki Murakami. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories. Various trans. Knopf, 2006. 334 pp. $24.95. To live in a Murakami story is to live at that difficult (albeit enthralling) intersection where explanation gives way to supple mystery,...

Robert Musil. Posthumous Papers of a Living Author.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Robert Musil. Posthumous Papers of a Living Author. Trans. Peter Wortsman. Archipelago Books, 2006. 192 pp. $15.00. Robert Musil wrote his Posthumous Papers during the 1920s for periodicals and newspapers while engaged on The Man Without...

Rebecca Goldstein. Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Rebecca Goldstein. Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. Schocken Books, 2006. 290 pp. $19.95. Following Robert Pinsky's The Life of David, Sherwin B. Nuland's Maimonides, and Douglas Century's Barney Ross, Rebecca...

Gerhard Roth. The Will to Sickness.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Gerhard Roth. The Will to Sickness. Trans. Tristram Wolff. Burning Deck, 2006. 120 pp. Paper: $14.00. Winter Journey (Winterreise) is the title of one Roth novel, and if the title evokes Schubert's song cycle about an unhappy wanderer, it...

Antonio Tabucchi. It's Getting Later All the Time.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Antonio Tabucchi. It's Getting Later All the Time. New Directions, 2006. 232 pp. Paper: $16.00. The puzzling title of this epistolary novel points the way to my reading. There is a play of words. How can "later" be happening "all the...

Toby Olson. The Bitter Half.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Toby Olson. The Bitter Half. FC2, 2006. 248 pp. $19.95. Ultimately, Toby Olson is a storyteller, and his stories succeed on the deep relationships his characters have with each other, and the esoteric communities they inhabit. The inherent...

Canxue. Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Can Xue. Blue Light in the Sky & Other Stories. Trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. New Directions, 2006. 212 pp. $14.95. In her Afterword, Can Xue tells us that to access the "realm" of her writing she must first "remove the stone...

Wilhelm Genazino. The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Wilhelm Genazino. The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt. Trans. Philip Boehm. New Directions, 2006. 132 pp. $14.95. The German writer, Wilhelm Genazino, asks us to take a walk with him around his native city of Frankfurt in his new novel, The Shoe...

Karen Russell. St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Karen Russell. St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Knopf, 2006. 242 pp. $22.00. Russell's first collection of stories amazes me. Most of them, set in a crazy Florida (of the mind?), are so startling in their antic juxtapositions of...

Books received.
March 22, 2007... Aira, Cesar. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, New Directions, 2006. $12.95. (F) Alexakis, Vassilis. Foreign Words, Autumn Hill Books, 2006. $16.95. (F) Alsford, Mike. Heroes & Villains, Baylor University Press, 2006....