The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from September 1993

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from September 1993

Behind the heart. (short story) (Djuna Barnes)
September 22, 1993... "Now it is of a little boy that I would tell you, Madame, and what he meant for just one week to a lady who had great consequence because her spirit had been level always, in spite of the cost, and for her it had been much, for she at forty had...

"A love from back of the heart": the story Djuna wrote for Charles Henri. (Charles Henri Ford) (Djuna Barnes)
September 22, 1993... Bats when they fly have of necessity their wings woven completely with a membrane, because the creatures of the night on which they feed seek to escape by means of confused revolutions and this confusion is enhanced by their various twists and...

Modern (post) modern: Djuna Barnes among the others. (Djuna Barnes)
September 22, 1993... My title is meant to indicate the difficulty of locating Djuna Barnes within those periodic, cultural, and artifactual constructions so dear to the academic heart, and I hope the "post" in the title, embraced on either side by a hovering...

Barnes being "beast familiar": representation on the margins of modernism. (Djuna Barnes)
September 22, 1993... Djuna Barnes wrote to her writer/agent/friend Emily Holmes Coleman that, before settling upon Nightwood as a title for her best-known novel, she had considered Night Beast, and regretted the "debased meaning now put on that nice word beast."(1)...

"I just loved Thelma": Djuna Barnes and the construction of bisexuality. (Thelma Wood) (Djuna Barnes)
September 22, 1993... When asked about her sexuality, Djuna Barnes is reported to have answered, "I'm not a lesbian, I just loved Thelma."' Given Barnes's apparent uneasiness with categorization, it is perhaps not surprising that readers of her work are divided over...

"This mysterious and migratory jewelry": satire and feminine in Djuna Barnes's "The Terrorists." (Djuna Barnes)
September 22, 1993... Djuna Barnes has said, "We would teach man with a joke."(1) Barnes's "jokes," however, catch everyone in their psychosexual-textual crossfire, leaving no social or psychic position unchallenged. While the humor in her writings often displays an...

Spectacular confessions: "How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed." (essay) (Djuna Barnes)
September 22, 1993... Throughout much of her career Djuna Barnes was engaged in performative journalism, staging sensationalistic events for public consumption, writing interviews with celebrities.1 In one of these pieces, a description of the experience of being...

"Lullaby for a lady's lady": Lesbian identity in 'Ladies Almanack.' (Djuna Barnes)
September 22, 1993... Now as a wonder worker, Dame Musset was perhaps at her very best when, carrying a pole and muff, and sporting an endearing tippet, she stepped out upon that exceding thin ice to which it has pleased God, more and more, to call frail woman,...

'Ryder' as contraception: Barnes v. the reproduction of mothering. (Djuna Barnes)
September 22, 1993... Djuna Barnes's family chronicle Ryder can, for many good reasons, be seen as a male-centered text, a critique of patriarchy mounted from within, through patriarchal stereotypes, styles, and genres. Described by early readers as "masculine,"...

Zadel Barnes: journalist. (Djuna's grandmother) (Djuna Barnes)
September 22, 1993... When we think of Zadel Barnes (1841-1917) today, we often reflect on the mystery surrounding those erotic letters she wrote in 1909 to her granddaughter Djuna, which suggest that they may have been involved in one of the rarest forms of incest....

Djuna Barnes's mystery in Morocco: making the most of little. (Djuna Barnes)
September 22, 1993... Djuna Barnes would seem in most ways to be an ideal subject for a biography. First of all, she lived a fascinating life. She did important things, she knew important people, she lived in exotic places. Second, she provided a record of that...

Revising 'Nightwood': "a kind of glee of despair." (Djuna Barnes)
September 22, 1993... The history of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood is complicated. She had spent years writing and revising the novel, submitting it to many publishers, only to face rejection after rejection. As Barnes confronted readers and publishers who were mystified...

A book of repulsive Jews?: rereading 'Nightwood.' (Djuna Barnes)
September 22, 1993... In some fifteen years of pushing Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood at people, I have discovered that those who love it are pulled through the long obsessions of its middle sections by a matching obsession, compelled by some personal connection,...

The "beast turning human": constructions of the "primitive" in 'Nightwood.' (Djuna Barnes)
September 22, 1993... In The Predicament of Culture, James Clifford notes that in the early part of the twentieth century, a distinctly modernist aesthetic developed in close proximity to ethnography. Like ethnography, this aesthetic valued "fragments, curious...

Works in progress: the uncollected poetry of Barnes's Patchin Place period. (Djuna Barnes) (Djuna Barnes)
September 22, 1993... Barnes wrote to Natalie Clifford Barney in 1965 that she was trying to put together what she called, in her characteristically apologetic way, "that horrid bulk termed |a choice, slim volume.'"(1) She had fourteen poems collected for her German...

Rattlesnake Farming.
September 22, 1993... Zoe Carver, around whom the many plots and concerns of Rattlesnake Farming coil, has not spoken in ten years - not since high school when her boyfriend insisted he had murdered his father and was institutionalized as insane, her grandmother...

Eclipse Fever.
September 22, 1993... Although it is not easy to summarize the plot of any fiction by Abish, this fact is especially true of his eagerly awaited new novel. On the surface it is a thriller involving the theft of pre-columbian art by a wealthy American collector,...

Time Remaining.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... "People question me," comments Odette in this campy novel." |You were always smart, but how did you get to be so erudite?' Devors, for example, who really did expect to outlive everybody, said to me - not so long before she failed to do so -...

Operation Wandering Soul.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... The MacArthur Foundation is certainly getting its money's worth from Richard Powers. After granting him their so-called genius award, he brought out his huge Gold Bug Variations, and now, barely two years later, comes another huge, rich novel....

Written on the Body.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... What do you call a woman who sleeps around? Men get to be Casanovas, they're never sluts. The perceived difference could be will vs. submissiveness: either you are in control and seducing the populace - or being used. This definition suggests...

The Correspondence.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... The Correspondence may very well be the novel some readers have longed for since the death of Nabokov. This astonishingly conceived and sumptuously written work can stand beside Pale Fire for its complexity and linguistic extravagance. It is...

Japanese by Spring.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... To some readers, Ishmael Reed's violent satires suggest that he is mad at almost everyone; his hit list seems endless. To the more temperate, he may, in Frost's phrase, have "had a lover's quarrel with the world." To still others, he seems to...

Tintin in the New World: A Romance.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... For his new novel, Frederic Tuten has borrowed Tintin, the boy/man comic-strip character created sixty years ago by the Belgian artist Herge, and involved him in that sometimes most painful of transformations - from child to man. The central...

Saving History.
September 22, 1993... Some concept of history has been important to all definitions of the postmodern. Howe's work fits many of these schemes, but none of them seems to be large enough to encompass completely her project. For example, in The Deep North (Sun & Moon,...

The Virtues of the Solitary Bird.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... Juan Goytisolo, one of the most important living novelists from Spain, in his Virtues of the Solitary Bird creates a kind of closet drama about the heritage of Spanish mysticism, traced from its roots in "triple-caste Spain" - Jewish, Moorish,...

What it Means to Be Avant-Garde.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... I am attracted to texts that resist the boundaries of genre. I think, for example, of Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, The Very Thing that Happens, The Book of Questions. These texts refuse to rest in comfortable positions. They seem to live in a...

Zimzum.
September 22, 1993... Lish is not afraid to violate taboo, to render discourse extravagant, to speak of that which others dare not, in his relentless exploration of the abscession of the human heart. A consummate stylist, Lish offers up sentences near perfect in...

Flan.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... Murder, rape, blasphemy, and suicide are only a few of the apocalyptic delights offered up on nearly every page of Flan, Stephen Tunney's violent and grotesque first novel. It is a beautifully dangerous book. By so ferociously sodomizing the...

The Inner Side of the Wind, or The Novel of Hero and Leander.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... Playfully inventive, Milorad Pavic's newest novel, his third, again a novel of the unique sort, one needing characteristic "directions" - it may be read from the front cover (Hero's story) or, if one flips the book, from the back (Leander's) -...

Double Jeopardy.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... One of the most talented writers in France today, Jean Echenoz has written five novels, all published by the prestigious Editions de Minuit, and has won two coveted literary prizes, the European Literature Prize for Lac and the Prix Medicis for...

Sweet Days of Discipline.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... Girlhood is not sweet in Fleur Jaeggy's short novel Sweet Days of Discipline. At fifteen, the narrator is wasted and wrung out by eight years in boarding schools. She wakes at five every morning and walks, "looking for solitude, and perhaps the...

At Sea.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... Peter Blue, Toby Olson's candidate for shamus of the year, is not Peter Gunn. For one thing he's married and for another he's much too contemporary. His beat, Provincetown, is not L.A., Frisco, or Vegas though it resembles Key West in a number...

The Food Chain.
September 22, 1993... Geoff Nicholson's new novel begins and skillfully enough ends in this human paradox: though we can elevate cooking and even hunger to the status of art, the act of eating, viewed with a surgical disregard for table manners and other religious...

Cock and Bull.
September 22, 1993... Cock & Bull, a pairing of two novellas, is the work of one of England's up-and-coming young writers whose first book, the story collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity, appeared with much fanfare in 1991. Cock & Bull is a book that might be...

Carnival Aptitude.
September 22, 1993... Perhaps the most intriguing texts challenge the very idea of genre. I want to look at two different collections that contain "short stories"; these stories are, however, so concentrated and intense that they resist easy classification. They can...

A City of Mazes.
September 22, 1993... Cynthia Hendershot's collection of short stories, City of Mazes, balances women ominously on the edge of sanity; Jessica Treat's collection, A Robber in the House, on the edge of dream. For both authors in their first collections of short-short...

A Robber in the House.
September 22, 1993... Cynthia Hendershot's collection of short stories, City of Mazes, balances women ominously on the edge of sanity; Jessica Treat's collection, A Robber in the House, on the edge of dream. For both authors in their first collections of short-short...

Three Blondes and Death.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... Hwbrgdtse is his name. The short declarative sentence is his game. Four hundred fifty-one pages of them! one hundred seventy-five chapters: "Hwbrgdtse was at party. It was being given by Rex. Rex was a friend of Alphabette's. Her hobby was...

The Pugilist at Rest.
September 22, 1993... The eleven stories comprising this debut collection have an impressive history: within the space of a year, eight of them appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Story, and elsewhere, and the volume's title selection deservedly took...

Three Cautionary Tales.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... This haunting book - two novellas and one long short story - explores the space inside three women where words are formed from silence. In this attempt to shatter emptiness, song and language arise as if out of an elemental desire to simply...

Swimming in the Volcano.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... Although Shacochis has written two collections of stories - both have received important literary awards - he is not as well known as he should be. I want here to look briefly at his first novel - a work of exceptional beauty and violence. It...

Hebdomeros.
September 22, 1993... Like Dali's melting watches, or the maddeningly pulsing heartbeat of Ravel's Botero, or Joyce's "signature of all things I am here to read," Giorgio de Chirico's early surrealistic paintings - piazzas, arcades, porticos, columns, statues,...

Norwegian Wood.
September 22, 1993... In 1989 Kodansha International published Alfred Bimbaum's translation of Murakami's 1982 novel A Wild Sheep Chase (reviewed RCF 10.2). Kodansha followed up on that novel's success with the release of Birnbaum's translation of A Hard-Boiled...

New Noir.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... The half-dozen nightmarish stories in New Noir, one of the first four installments of Fiction Collective Two's well-made and good-looking Black Ice Books series, make Nirvana's Kurt Cobain look a little like a primpy choir-boy. Punctuated with...

Revelation Countdown.
September 22, 1993... Among the short fiction pieces of Cris Mazza's Revelation Countdown, my favorite is the very first story, "Guys with Trucks in Texas and California," despite the fact that its (mock) macho style and its subject matter appealed neither to the...

The Kafka Chronicles.
September 22, 1993... Among the short fiction pieces of Cris Mazza's Revelation Countdown, my favorite is the very first story, "Guys with Trucks in Texas and California," despite the fact that its (mock) macho style and its subject matter appealed neither to the...

The Life and Times of Captain N.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... Although Glover gives us a novel about the "life and times" of various participants in the American Revolution, he knows that history is ghostly narrative, shifting juxtaposition. He moves from his narrative to one written by Oskar (the English...

The Maravillas District.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... The Maravillas District (Spanish original 1976) is the first in a trilogy of autobiographical novels that plot out the daily life of two girls on the transitional cusp between childhood and adulthood in Madrid of the 1920s. Chacel recreates the...

Too Far From Home: Selected Writings.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... I am pleased that this compilation of Bowles's writing - stories, essays, letters, poems - is available. It will surely be the first volume future readers will explore. It is indispensible. Although Bowles has often been praised for his...

Herman.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... Herman is the story of a small boy, Herman Fulkt, who lives with his parents in an apartment in Oslo, attends the local grade school where he is the scapegoat of teachers and the victim of bullies, haunts his neighborhood busy about the dreamy,...

Thief of Lives.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... The "imagination of disaster" in Kit Reed's collection of stories, Thief of Lives, is vivid. These stories creep up on you, unnerve, make you anxious. Over and over again in seemingly innocuous middle-class lives, Reed images a monster - a...

Last Nights of Paris.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... Readers of Paterson and of Williams's Autobiography perhaps recall references to Soupault, whose 1928 novel Les Dernieres nuits de Paris Williams translated after becoming friends with the French writer. Williams's translation, published in...

transiT.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... "What follows is an interval of odorless dreams moving like pages that will not stay turned," reads a passage in Rosaire Appel's second novel, transiT, and this dual state of flux and paralysis describes not only consciousness as experienced by...

The Lone Ranger and the Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.
September 22, 1993... Each of the twenty-two stories in Sherman Alexie's collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven examines the modem problems and contradictions of reservation life. Most of the stories are situated on the Spokane Indian Reservation,...

The Book of the Mad: The Secret Books of Paradys, IV.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... Unlike much of the illiterate medievalism that passes for fantasy these days, the final volume of Tanith Lee's tetralogy depicts a fully realized alternative world. And, like other works of true literature, The Book of the Mad passes a more...

Likely Stories: A Postmodern Sampler.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... Likely Stories gathers twenty-three examples of Canadian postmodern fiction bracketed by two short essays (one by each of the book's editors) on what postmodernism may be. Contributors include David Arnason, Margaret Atwood, Dionne Brand, David...

Constructing Postmodernism.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... Brian McHale owns postmodernism: his 1987 book Postmodernist Fiction remains the best introduction to this slippery term and the multitude of devices and strategies it encompasses, and now comes Constructing Postmodernism, which refines and...

Women Without Men: Female Bonding and the American Novel of the 1980s.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... Although Greiner discusses such books as The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Chodorow) and Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories on Women (Bleier), he is not primarily interested in...

The Infinite Conversation.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1993... Written during the struggle between Hegelianism and anti-Hegelianism in French thought preceding poststructuralism, Blanchot's Infinite Conversation provides a crucial link for understanding the more immediate roots of poststructuralism. Though...

The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller.
September 22, 1993... Erica Jong met Henry Miller shortly after he began to write her letters saying how much he admired Fear of Flying. As their friendship grew, so did her desire to write a book about him, his work, and its relevance to issues still of concern...

Djuna Barnes: an updated bibliography. (Djuna Barnes) (Bibliography)
September 22, 1993... The following items did not appear in Douglas Messerli's 1975 bibliography of Barnes's work nor in the bibliography prepared by Janice Thom and Kevin Engel for Mary Lynn Broe's Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes (Carbondale:...