The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from September 1994

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from September 1994

A passionate remembrance. (Angela Carter)
September 22, 1994... I FIRST MET ANGELA CARTER twenty-some years ago in that privileged space where the greatest literary friendships are sealed: on the page and unannounced. An unknown book plucked from a stack of books, a half-attentive and skeptical read, a...

An interview with Angela Carter. (Angela Carter) (Interview)
September 22, 1994... CRAMMED IN WITH ALL the other gear packed for a ski trip was my copy of Angela Carter's newest novel, Wise Children. Because sheer exhaustion made it difficult for me to stay awake past nine o'clock, I didn't get to finish the book, which in a...

Gender matters in 'The Sadeian Woman.' (Angela Carter)
September 22, 1994... A NUMBER OF CRITICS HAVE "called into question" the feminist ideology informing Angela Carter's works, but probably no single concept has been contested more frequently than that of the "moral pornographer."(1) Indeed, Carter herself...

All you need is 'Love': Angela Carter's novel of sixties sex and sensibility. (Angela Carter)
September 22, 1994... IN HER AFTERWORD to the revised 1987 edition of Love, Angela Carter reveals the obscure source of inspiration for her narrative of sixties sexual misadventure: "I first got the idea for Love, from Benjamin Constant's...novel of sensibility,...

Fairy tale as sexual allegory: intertextuality in Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber.' (Angela Carter)
September 22, 1994... ANGELA CARTER, IN HER 1990 introduction to The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book, makes a distinction between folklore, emerging from oral "unofficial" culture, and the fairy tale, product of a literary "official" culture. Folklore, she explains, is...

A scatological and cannibal clock: Angela Carter's "The Fall River Axe Murders." (Angela Carter)
September 22, 1994... AT THE STORY'S CENTER, the sun's vortex gyres; it is, turn by turn: a Catherine's wheel, the unstoppable face of a clock, the mouth of Moloch, of an ogress, a furnace, an anus, and a vexing mirror which, like a hangman's noose, mercilessly...

Textualizing the double-gendered body: forms of the grotesque in 'The Passion of New Eve.' (Angela Carter)
September 22, 1994... THE WORLD OF ANGELA CARTER's fiction is inhabited by fabulous, monstrous creations: she-wolves, bird women, drag queens. The composite nature of these mythic figures often becomes the point of textual fascination in several of her novels and...

Fresh iconography: subversive fantasy by Angela Carter. (Angela Carter)
September 22, 1994... A WRITER OF CONSIDERABLE originality, English novelist and fabulist Angela Carter is an independent-minded feminist with small tolerance for the cultural determinism that distorts female being. She has even written an interpretation of the...

In despair of the old Adams: Angela Carter's 'The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman.' (Angela Carter)
September 22, 1994... LET'S BEGIN WITH the castle. We don't know where it is; we don't even know when it is--we are in Nebulous Time here, and space and time have nothing to do with the spatiotemporal manifold most of us like to think we move around in. What we do...

The Hoffmann connection: demystification in Angela Carter's 'The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman.' (E.T.A. Hoffmann) (Angela Carter)
September 22, 1994... IN THE AFTERWORD to Fireworks (1974) Angela Carter expresses her admiration for E. T. A. Hoffmann and Poe, who write in such an extreme fashion that they do not trick us about the nature of social problems. She states, "I'd always been fond of...

Panopticism in 'Nights at the Circus.' (Angela Carter)
September 22, 1994... IN HER "POLEMICAL PREFACE" to The Sadeian Woman Angela Carter writes, All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and...

The other other: self-definition outside patriarchal institutions in Angela Carter's 'Wise Children.' (Angela Carter)
September 22, 1994... IN A PATRIARCHAL, dualistic culture the male needs the female in order to define himself. Without the female "lack," the male penis cannot be seen as "essential," "preferred," or "extra." Consequently, if the female is to define herself...

'Wise Children': Angela Carter's swan song. (Angela Carter)
September 22, 1994... ONCE UPON A TIME, when humans believed crocodiles shed tears upon eating a man, they also believed that the swan, which makes no more than an angry hiss during its lifetime, would burst forth into full and glorious song when it felt the...

Remembering Angela Carter. (Angela Carter)
September 22, 1994... IN THE SUMMER OF 1991 I called the publicity department at Chatto & Windus requesting an interview with one of their authors, Angela Carter. Instead of a contact number or address, Chatto provided me only a few carefully guarded assertions...

An Angela Carter bibliography. (Angela Carter) (Bibliography)
September 22, 1994... Fiction Shadow Dance. London: Pan, 1965; published in the U.S. as Honeybuzzard. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. The Magic Toyshop. London: Virago, 1967. Several Perceptions. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. Heroes...

Tadeusz Konwicki: an introduction. (Tadeusz Konwicki)
September 22, 1994... TO WHAT EXTENT CAN an American reader understand Konwicki? Konwicki himself fears that he is not understood because he is Polish, not understood by "a member of a close-knit, stable, sleepy society suffering from sluggish digestion." Almost...

"Everything comes from what I said at the beginning, from this territory": an interview with Tadeusz Konwicki. (Tadeusz Konwicki) (Interview)
September 22, 1994... DOROTA SOBIESKA: I have plenty of questions but would prefer this to be more of a conversation. TADEUSZ KONWICKI: Yes, but I have to have something to start with, and the best questions are silly because they give one a chance to say...

From 'The Calendar and the Hourglass.' (excerpts) (Tadeusz Konwicki)
September 22, 1994... New Year with a Bad Hangover WHERE TO START? Maybe with the sign of the cross or a magic charm. I'm a superstitious person, and getting more and more so. Only people enjoying prosperity, people on a run of good luck, make fun of...

I am invited to write about Konwicki. (Tadeusz Konwicki)
September 22, 1994... I STARTED MY READING of Konwicki with Moonrise, Moonset (1982; English translation 1987) which may have been a mistake. I liked it. The wit, the complaining, the cracks at the competition, the rooster struts, the confessions of weakness, envy,...

Beyond ideology: the prose of Tadeusz Konwicki. (Tadeusz Konwicki)
September 22, 1994... IN MANY WAYS TADEUSZ KONWICKI (born in 1926) is a typical example of a writer who entered mature life in Poland after the establishment of the communist dictatorship in 1945. His writing underwent a gradual transformation from socialist...

Where the marshes are: Romantic mediumism in the novels of Tadeusz Konwicki. (Tadeusz Konwicki)
September 22, 1994... TADEUSZ KONWICKI, AS HE acknowledged in a 1971 interview, became bored with the solitary act of writing. So he has, for some time now, tried to engage readers in the creative process, leaving about 30 percent of the novel making to them. He...

Tadeusz Konwicki's 'A Dreambook for Our Time': a Polish classic. (Tadeusz Konwicki)
September 22, 1994... THE FICTION OF THE POLISH novelist and screenwriter Tadeusz Konwicki first drew wide attention in the West when his novel A Dreambook for Our Time (Sennik wspolczesny) appeared in English in 1976 (after a 1969 hardcover edition) in Penguin's...

Training the memory: dystopian history in Konwicki's 'A Minor Apocalypse.' (Tadeusz Konwicki)
September 22, 1994... "You know, I think the end of the world's coming. Why is everything falling apart? East and West. The beginning of the end of the world. But it could last a long time, the end. Centuries." --Tadeusz Konwicki, A Minor Apocalypse(1) ...

'Bohin Manor': romance with nothingness. (Tadeusz Konwicki)
September 22, 1994... PERHAPS THE MOST STARTLING, irritating, and paralyzing trait of Tadeusz Konwicki's work is its internal contradictions, its divergence of purpose, even its contradictory identity. In his books we find a paradoxical combination of the past and...

A note on Konwicki's filmmaking. (includes a filmography of Konwicki's work) (Tadeusz Konwicki)
September 22, 1994... TADEUSZ KONWICKI'S FILMMAKING ADVENTURE, now well into its fourth decade, is not a common scenario. While film directors frequently cross over into literature, if only to coauthor a screenplay, few novelists are ever offered a chance to stand...

A Tadeusz Konwicki checklist. (Bibliography)
September 22, 1994... Novels Przy budowie (At the Building Site). Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1950. Godzina smutku (The Hour of Sadness). Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1954. Wladza (Power). Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1954. Klucz (The Key). Warsaw: Nasza Ksiegarnia, 1955....

Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera.
September 22, 1994... While still in his forties, John Barth announced his intention to lead a "writerly life as long as Thomas Mann's or Nabokov's," thereby avoiding the cliched fate of our more celebrated American novelists, who have seldom maintained the extended...

Ten Tall Tales and True.
September 22, 1994... Gray, author of the landmark postmodern workLanark, although a popular success in Europe and critically acclaimed throughout the world, is still barely known in this country. This Scottish writer's most recent works, Poor Things and Ten Tales...

Poor Things.
September 22, 1994... Gray, author of the landmark postmodern workLanark, although a popular success in Europe and critically acclaimed throughout the world, is still barely known in this country. This Scottish writer's most recent works, Poor Things and Ten Tales...

The Journalist.
September 22, 1994... Mathews's first three novels were elaborate, comically erudite inventions that firmly established his place both in the American avant-garde and in the French Oulipo group, that workshop for experimental fiction founded by Raymond Queneau and...

City of Light.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Camilo Jose Cela, in Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son, has a deranged mother corresponding with her dead son. Cyrus Colter, in City of Light, has a psychotic son writing letters to his dead mother. Both correspondents suffer from obsessive love,...

Games of the Blind.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... The novelist Evelin Sullivan is quickly emerging as one of the most graceful and imaginative stylists in American fiction, and in Games of the Blind, her new novel, she continues to explore the outer reaches of amorous obsession. Although both...

***: Four Walls Eight Windows.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Michael Brodsky's latest book is an exploration of concepts, similar in many respects to the exploration of his previous books. As in his short story "X in Paris," at the heart of this story is an unknowable, in this case ***, which at times...

Altmann's Tongue.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Brian Evenson's first book, Altmann's Tongue, is a strong collection of twentyfive stories and a novella. Showing off Evenson's myriad skills, the stories range from rural tales of death to a retelling of the biblical Job story, in which a...

The Way We Know in Dreams.
September 22, 1994... Gordon Weaver, the distinguished editor of cimarron Review, is a deceptive writer. Although he usually writes in an apparently simple manner, he troubles us with his metaphysical and epistemological questions. The title of his new collection of...

The Mortician's Apprentice.
September 22, 1994... "Death comes along like a gas bill one can't pay," Anthony Burgess once asserted, "and that's all one can say about it." In a sense, of course, he's right. That's all one can say about it. But, in another, death informs everything most of us...

Doggy Bag.
September 22, 1994... The title of Ronald Sukenick's new volume of fiction suggests a collection of pieces that could not be consumed at the right time, but Doggy Bag is by no means as miscellaneous as that sounds. Sukenick writes ironically over earlier narratives...

The Ethiopian Exhibition.
September 22, 1994... The title of Ronald Sukenick's new volume of fiction suggests a collection of pieces that could not be consumed at the right time, but Doggy Bag is by no means as miscellaneous as that sounds. Sukenick writes ironically over earlier narratives...

Damned Right.
September 22, 1994... The title of Ronald Sukenick's new volume of fiction suggests a collection of pieces that could not be consumed at the right time, but Doggy Bag is by no means as miscellaneous as that sounds. Sukenick writes ironically over earlier narratives...

A Singular Man.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Bove, one of the best novelists to emerge in France during the interwar years, has been strangely ignored since his death in 1945, not only in the U.S. but in France. A few excellent works by him have been published here recently but they...

The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... The mark of Lydia Davis's translation can be cited right away in the American title for this most recent of Maurice Blanchot's fictions to appear in English. Davis's elegant variation of Blanchot's French title (Celui qui ne m'accompagnait...

Sweetbitter.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In his first novel, Reginald Gibbons, who has already established himself both as an accomplished poet and as the editor of Northwestern University's fine literary magazine TriQuarterly, stakes out new literary territory as a fiction writer of...

The Great Divorce.
September 22, 1994... Although Martin and Mojtabai are two of our most intriguing novelists, their texts have not achieved great popularity. (Martin's Mary Reilly, a novel symbiotically related to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, has been treated at length in a book by...

Called Out.
September 22, 1994... Although Martin and Mojtabai are two of our most intriguing novelists, their texts have not achieved great popularity. (Martin's Mary Reilly, a novel symbiotically related to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, has been treated at length in a book by...

Requiem: A Hallucination.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... "Mixing memory and desire," the living and the dead, the past and the present, Antonio Tabucchi's unnamed narrator finds himself miraculously transported from a friend's house in Azeitao, where he was reading Fernando Pessoa's The Book of...

One Night Stands.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Rosa Liksom (b. 1958) is acclaimed in Finland for her prize-winning short fictions and her flamboyant, cartoon- and graffiti-inspired paintings. One Night Stands offers a selection from Liksom's first three books, inventively rendered into...

The Duchess's Dragonfly.
September 22, 1994... Once upon a time an artist goes to visit a Spanish duchess in her palace. He stays for forty-two days and they have an affair. He makes a series of forty-two engravings for her: an offering, a criticism, and a narrative of their love. The...

A Disturbance in One Place.
September 22, 1994... A Disturbance in One Place, Binnie Kirshenbaum's second novel, is a rogue book: erotic, dark, amusing, irresistible. And, as rogues will, it breaks the reader's heart. Lyrical and prosaic, laced with sardonic wit, often hilarious, yet filled...

The House on R. Street.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Because the title of this darkly poetic novel is simple, it doesn't convey the oddity of Kohler's work. The novel is divided into three parts--"Spring," "Summer," "Autumn"--which suggests orderly seasonal change, human passage. But instead of...

The Secrets of the Camera Obscura.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... The first camera obscura we encounter here overlooks cliffs and water in San Francisco. By moving a periscope an image of the world outside is projected in the light-proofed viewing room. An irresistible metaphor for the writing life, and the...

Robert Crews.
September 22, 1994... Let there be no misunderstanding, Thomas Berger is a national treasure. For the past thirty-six years he has quietly created a body of fiction as varied and original as any in American letters, and he stands today as a compelling voice giving...

Price of Admission.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Sam Eisenstein's novella presents the all-night movie theater as an existential landscape where absurdity after absurdity can be presented as undeniable truth both on and off the screen: the theater, the projection room, the screen, the lobby,...

A Proletarian Novel.
September 22, 1994... First published in Brazil in 1933, Patricia Galvao's Industrial Park is an early modernist work (published here with a lengthy aftwrword on the period) depicting life in Braz, the factory district of Sao Paolo. With chapter headings like "In a...

Yankee Doodle.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Although the cover of this novel is printed in red, white, and blue, Edward does not celebrate the American ideal. His novel is, in fact, a hallucinatory, apocalyptic vision of our dreams of earthly paradise, eternal victory. For an epigraph...

The Legend of Olivia Cosmos Montevideo.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Olivia Cosmos Montevideo is not, of course, the real name of Constance Warloe's narrator and main character. It is rather a secret identity of sorts, a high wall behind which Roberta Patterson Masters--disaffected wife of Andrew, bereaved...

Zapped: Two Novellas.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... What do Zap Comix, foot fetishism, leprosy, and postmodernist musings on the nature of fictionality have in common? The answer is Robert Peters, who has fashioned of these disparate elements a pair of surprising, deft, and funny novellas. The...

The Tower of Babel.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... In 1958, when this "novel" was written, Jack Spicer (1925-65) hoped to find a publisher; that never happened. Though purists will fuss that the fiction fails both as a detective novel and as a memoir on the San Francisco renaissance, Spicer...

Night Patrol and Other Stories.
September 22, 1994... One of the major glasnost-era writers, Kuraev is motivated as much by political, historical, and sociological as literary matters. Nevertheless he's managed to develop a unique literary style, as the three novellas contained in this volume...

My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... This is a remarkable and refreshing book. It reminds me at times of Great Expectations and A Clockwork Orange. Not that Will Self is merely derivative, but one starts to wonder when all the big writers of current British publishing hail Mr....

Incidences.
September 22, 1994... Much outstanding Soviet modernist literature was suppressed by Stalin and his successors, with the result that many brilliant Soviet avant-garde writers are little known today in the West (and even in Russia). Even by their standards Daniil...

Mefisto in Onyx.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... No way could I budge. My laundry was downstairs in the basement, drying on a thirty-minute cycle, retrieval in a timely fashion was imperative, grace periods might slow the inevitable but inevitably some neighbor would come along, you know the...

Eumeswil.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... First published in Germany in 1977 when Junger was eighty-two (he is now ninety-nine), Eumeswil is only one of a handful of his fifty novels to be translated into English. Considered by many to be his masterpiece, it takes the form of...

A Frank O'Connor Reader.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... There is more to Irish literature than Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett, and Frank O'Connor proves that. The problem, however, is that O'Connor, and many realist writers of his generation (Sean O'Faolain and Liam O'Flaherty, for example), tend to be...

Paris, When It's Naked.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... What does one do in the "capitol of the nineteenth century" approaching the end of the twentieth? Etel Adnan's Paris, When It's Naked casts itself as fiction. It's the fictive being of the city that's remade within the writer at each...

L'Apres-vivre.
September 22, 1994... In one sense, it doesn't matter what the critics make of the latest in Serge Doubrovsky's series of "true novels," or autofictions. L'Apres-vivre (Living After) was written for--or rather, in spite of--one person only: the woman of the...

Le Directeur du Musee des Cadeaux des Chefs d'Etat de l'Etranger.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... The Pelican Brief this isn't. But then, it isn't supposed to be. Though the French enjoy murder mysteries a l'americaine (John Grisham is carried in translation by the French Book-of-the Month Club), their own literature is noteworthy for its...

Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Camp has been around for at least a hundred years, and though a few attempts have been made in the past to define its essence--by Christopher Isherwood in his novel The World in the Evening (1954) and Susan Sontag in her "Notes on Camp"...

Aharon Appelfeld: The Holocaust and Beyond.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Although the Holocaust is perhaps the most shattering event in recent history, it is difficult to present it in linguistic terms. Words are inadequate, as they are in describing spiritual, "fantastic" experience of any sort. Perhaps Kafka is...

In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Jeffrey Miller, Bowles's bibiographer and for twenty years a collector of Bowles's letters, has here assembled more than four hundred letters written to several dozen recipients between 1928 (when Bowles was eighteen) and 1991. Culled from...

Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters and Files.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... Although I have written before on art criticism by Davenport (on Balthus) and Simic (on Cornell) in an attempt to show that their criticism is a reflection of peculiar stylistic effects--to attack the arbitrary names given to forms of...

Painting and Guns.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... This handy little volume in the Hanuman miniature books series collects two interview-essays, counterposing two classic disciplines that in combination figure at the center of Burroughs's concerns--art and violence. "The War Universe" opens as...

Narrative and Culture.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1994... This wonderful collection is an attempt to explore the meanings of narrative and culture. The editors recognize that these abstract nouns are suspect, mysterious, devious. The collection is, as Carlisle suggests in her introduction, a kind of...