The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from September 1995

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from September 1995

Brigid Brophy: an introduction and checklist.
September 22, 1995... There was a time, in the sixties and early seventies, when no one needed an introduction to Brigid Brophy. She was one of the most controversial writers in England - occupying a position somewhat like Camille Paglia's today - and here in the...

The neglect of Brigid Brophy.
September 22, 1995... Brigid Brophy has been neglected not only in the academy but also outside it: neither my university library in England nor the local public libraries possess any of her novels, and they are now equally unobtainable in bookshops. Neglect (and...

Mozart, moonshots, and monkey business in Brigid Brophy's 'Hackenfeller Ape.'
September 22, 1995... Somewhere in the Robert Louis Stevenson canon he talks about "playing the sedulous ape," sedulousness being that form of general abuse to which writers assiduously aspire. But in addition to playing the sedulous ape, one may also speak of...

Desperately seeking Susan[na]: closeted quests and Mozartean gender bending in Brigid Brophy's 'The King of a Rainy Country.'
September 22, 1995... At first glance (and perhaps second and subsequent glances) Brigid Brophy's second novel, The King of a Rainy Country, might not seem an Ur-text of lesbian postmodernity.(1) Like many of its earliest critics, Charles J. Rolo found it merely "a...

'The Finishing Touch' and the tradition of homoerotic girls' school fictions.
September 22, 1995... Upon her death, the British novelist Sarah Scott (1732-1795) requested that her personal papers, including her intimate correspondence with her longtime companion Barbara Montagu, be destroyed.(1) Yet given the suave, bravura skill with which,...

Concordia discors: Brigid Brophy's 'In Transit.'
September 22, 1995... In the sixties and seventies a type of novel came into being in England that took radical leave of such narrative conventions as character, plot, causality, perspective, and even traditional typography. To see these texts as stages in the...

Brigid Brophy's it's-all-right-I'm-only-dying comedy of modern manners: notes on 'In Transit.'
September 22, 1995... In transit resembles, according to Frank Kermode, "a kit of symbols" that can be "fit together in an indeterminate number of ways" (414), or to apply a quote from the novel itself, this is "less a book than a box of trick tools, its title DO IT...

Translating 'In Transit': writing - by proxy.
September 22, 1995... "Ce qui m'etonnait c'etait qu'it was my French that disintegrated first."(1) This magic sentence caught me unawares one afternoon during the late sixties as I was browsing through the fiction shelves of the Swiss Cottage Library in north London....

Communication breakdown and the 'twin genius' of Brophy's 'In Transit.'
September 22, 1995... I am caught, by choice, between Brophy's novel In Transit and her defense of fiction in Prancing Novelist. Two brief asides/allusions to the novel within the defense make the former a point of departure, and the latter a destination. I read in...

'Aggressive, witty & unrelenting': Brigid Brophy and Ronald Firbank.
September 22, 1995... In October 1962 readers of Alan Ross's London Magazine were provided with a useful piece of information: The three greatest novels of the twentieth century are The Golden Bowl, A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu and Concerning the Eccentricities of...

Testing language: Robert Creeley's fiction.
September 22, 1995... To write fiction was Robert Creeley's idea. As a young man, he named a volume of prose fiction "the first book of my own imagination,"(1) stories, "fragments of acts that got displaced by the words as he worked to test the meanings, the...

Robert Creeley: in conversation.(Interview)
September 22, 1995... I interviewed Robert Creeley in early January 1993 at his home in Buffalo, New York. I'd been reading and rereading his fiction while in residence at the Millay Colony and had been particularly taken with the sentence concluding his...

Afterword to 'Die Goldgraber.'
September 22, 1995... Whatever I might have thought writing to mean as a life or its occupation, these various stories were its insistent manifest and practice. No doubt as many others indeed, I was innocent of any real sense of writing as a profession when I first...

Homage to Turgenev. (short story)
September 22, 1995... However, I think I have said enough; and when it comes down to it, all this is nothing but words. - Turgenev, letter to M. A. Milyutina, Paris, 6 March 1875 The wandering story begins in the mid-1800s in Russia with a gathering of young men,...

The monster come to dinner.
September 22, 1995... The writer's placement and adjustment of the materials given him create the form and meaning of his work. That such literally happens again and again inscribes the curiosity that is his vocation. External impositions of what might be called...

The poet in Robert Creeley's prose.
September 22, 1995... Robert Creeley's poems are brief, emotional machines of concise industry. They often leave a rhythmical hum in the mind, the aftereffects of their intellectual and emotional artistry. The prose - a collection of stories, a novel, incidental...

Awake to particulars: the prose of Robert Creeley.
September 22, 1995... We met Robert Creeley at Miriam and Toby Olson's. Michael Heller and Bobby Byrd were there too. Creeley walked Bobby Byrd to our place at three A.M. or so. We had already gone home to bed. They had a key but could not get the door open. The...

Aloneness in 'The Gold Diggers.'
September 22, 1995... Written when Robert Creeley still aspired to be mainly a writer of fiction in the early and mid-fifties, The Gold Diggers presages what would be the major concerns in his novel The Island and later gatherings of his prose and poetry. The stories...

Ending in ellipsis, the sea in our ears: Robert Creeley's 'The Island.'
September 22, 1995... A little past the halfway point of The Island, its central character, John, runs into trouble. His wife, Joan, wants only to be left alone in the act of herself. Their house has its own order as does the village in which they are living. No one...

Creeley's eye and the fiction of the self.
September 22, 1995... Robert Creeley's fiction, like his poetry, is preoccupied with self-reflection. His work is not so much an expression of an already defined "I" but an exploration or excavation of self: an extrapolation (estimation of unknown facts from a limited...

Inappropriate literary performances: the unstable texts of Robert Creeley's 'Mabel: A Story, and Other Prose.'
September 22, 1995... In introductory remarks to the writing in his book of prose fiction, Mabel: A Story, and Other Prose, Robert Creeley makes statements that can provide significant insight into this prose if we worry them sufficiently. I begin this essay by doing...

Osman Lins: an introduction.
September 22, 1995... When he died of cancer three days after turning fifty-four, Osman Lins (1924-1978) was one of the most prominent figures of twentieth-century Brazilian literature and a writer of international renown whose works had been translated into several...

An interview with Osman Lins.
September 22, 1995... Osman Lins died on 8 July 1978 without having been able to answer the questions submitted to him by Edla Van Steen for her series of interviews with Brazilian writers. What follows is a collage created one week after his death by his wife,...

Of idealism and glory.
September 22, 1995... What does a writer seek? A true writer, that is, one who makes the written word his reason of life. For, as with everything, and just as there are bad ministers, for example, writers have their imitators too. Those who imitate the gestures of a...

The Head Carried in Triumph. (fiction) (excerp)
September 22, 1995... When he died, Osman Lins left an unfinished novel (138 pages) to which in the beginning he gave the working title A cabeca e o corpo (The Head and the Body). Later, as the book was taking shape, he changed this title to A cabega levada em triunfo...

Osman Lins: crossing frontiers.
September 22, 1995... The Meaning of the Conquest of New Markets France, Germany, Czechoslovakia. Finland, Hungary, Portugal, Spain, the United States - through novels or short stories Osman Lins's work is conquering its own space. A lot is often known about...

Living on literature or for literature?
September 22, 1995... Reunion Yesterday, thirteen years after his death, I saw Osman Lins again. Our encounter took place in the basement of an old convent; beneath its low ceiling he was staging the first play of his Theater of the Infinite. The play, Victory...

Narration in many voices.
September 22, 1995... The narratives of Osman Lins in Nine, Novena combine multiple perspectives and various planes of action. Two of them in particular, "Hahn's Pentagon" and "Lost and Found" (in which the polymorphism of the composition recalls contrapuntal...

'Nine, Novena's novelty.
September 22, 1995... The writer's political conscience was a subject in vogue during the Brazilian military dictatorship of the seventies. Very often fiction writers such as Antonio Callado, Fernando Gabeira, Ignacio de Loyola Brandao, and Ivan Angelo, to name just a...

Osman Lins's 'Avalovara.'
September 22, 1995... Distant explosions make the crystal chandeliers tinkle, but the two lovers on the big pink rug don't look up. We are in the declining luxury of a parlor - faded damask, golden velvet - where someone called Abel and his perfect mistress meet...

The world without quotation marks: a gloss of the gloss.
September 22, 1995... The specular conception of the novel proposed by Stendhal in one of the prefaces to Lucien Leuwen must be refined if we want to apply it to The Queen of the Prisons of Greece by Osman Lins. Here it is no longer, as in realist fiction, a matter of...

The prison house of language according to Osman Lins.
September 22, 1995... The One and the Many. In the Timaeus Plato distinguishes between constancy without origin and productivity without end. The former is logos; the latter doxa, mythos. In any case Becoming, even when rejected, emerges as an antimodel in opposition...

Trinity Fields.
September 22, 1995... In an interview in the spring 1995 issue of Bomb, Bradford Morrow explains that he writes anthropological novels, books that "explore how the culture works at a macrocosmic level, as well as an individual level." What interests him in Trinity...

Anarcho-Hindu.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Anarcho-Hindu, Curtis White's new novel, shares his previous fiction's attempts to combine critical analysis of our nation's collective social and cultural failures with the search for a vision of possible better realities. But unlike his earlier...

Your Name Here: ________.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Cris Mazza is the author of two previous novels, Exposed and How to Leave a Country, and two books of short stories, Animal Acts and Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? Her favorite subject is the ambiguous nature of reality in relationships between...

Be Brave.
September 22, 1995... Robert Pinget's voice and themes have often been compared to those of Beckett (the two were, in fact, friends), and it is Beckett that the stark humor and brevity of his latest two books bring to mind. Although one of the leading practitioners of...

Theo or The New Era.
September 22, 1995... Robert Pinget's voice and themes have often been compared to those of Beckett (the two were, in fact, friends), and it is Beckett that the stark humor and brevity of his latest two books bring to mind. Although one of the leading practitioners of...

A .38 Special and a Broken Heart.
September 22, 1995... Many of the twenty-nine short-short stories found in this slim volume were so interesting I resented their length, as though something quite extrinsic were at work here, a parent shutting off the television set mid-shootout. Maybe this is the...

Sexual Blood.
September 22, 1995... Mark Amerika's first novel, The Kafka Chronicles, functioned as an extended discharge of stylistic static, an anti-narrative as mind-altering drug laced with gamesome puns, rabid politics, good old deconstructive entertainment, and rambling...

The Invention of Violence.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... A few years ago Cinco Puntos Press published the first book of short fiction by Dagoberto Gilb and these stories went on to be recognized with a major prize for fiction. Douglas Gunn's work has similarities to Gilb's: the struggles of work and...

Monkey Secret.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Diane Glancy's spare, halting style aptly embodies her characters' sense of emptiness and their constant searching for a voice or a place within their culture. In these three short stories and a novella, men and women listen for the voices of...

Chekov.
September 22, 1995... Edward Sanders is fueled by a heavy mix of radical thought and action - his own and others' - and from Poem from Jail (1963) to "Hymn to the Rebel Cafe" (1993) his work has explored the necessity for and consequences of that radicalism. Yet to...

Come! Meet My Family and Other Stories.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... The reader guilelessly approaching Paul Beckman's collection of short stories should heed the cover photo: the snapshot of a young woman in a fifties-style coat and hairdo standing in front of a house, her hands on the shoulders of junior -...

Nice Little Stories Jam-Packed with Depraved Sex and Violence.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... The Naughty Yard, Michael Hemmingson's unfairly neglected first book, was a violently raw and vibrantly menaced gem concerning a trio of baby busters who gather late one night on a couch in front of the television in a small apartment in southern...

Fur.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Grotesque but alluring, Liliane Giraudon's stories explore the regions of the mind that are dark and forbidden. Through her characters, each of them plagued by a fateful love affair or obsession, she crosses into the taboos of bestiality and...

Men of Maize.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Gerald Martin's translation of Asturias's obscure 1949 masterpiece is accompanied by a lengthy, well-researched introduction placing the writer and his oeuvre in context, a glossary, a bibliography, almost sixty pages of footnotes, and an...

An Indecent Recollection.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Though the French publisher of An Indecent Recollection scandalously hypes it as "porn" and "feminist," your first instinct on reading it may be to accept the first part of the designation and reject, as more doubtful, on the face of it, the...

The Yandilli Trilogy.
September 22, 1995... Although I read Captivity Captive when it first appeared, I did not know that it would eventually become the last novel of this trilogy. The trilogy is on one level about the exploration of New South Wales (from its beginnings to the present),...

Skyblue's Essays: Fictions.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Burning Deck is one of the best small presses I know, and Dallas Wiebe is one of the oddest writers I know. His texts are "crossovers"; they refuse to be categorized. His latest collection of "essays" fights the notion of conventional essays. He...

Terminal Weird.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... This Seattle-based press usually publishes unremarkable fiction by working-class types. You know that movie where Dennis Hopper says "Just because it happened to you, doesn't mean that it's worth reading"? That's the sort of stuff they had been...

Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Andre Alexis's first collection of short fiction plunges the reader into a realm where ordinary experience is only a faint memory of a once hierarchically ordered and explainable universe. The setting, although recognizable in terms of its...

Cement.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... A Soviet classic, Tsement (1932) symbolized in its time the reconstruction of a Russia ravaged by revolution and civil war. Gladkov (1883-1958) belonged to The Forge, a team of writers that praised the coming of the Machine Age at the service of...

Christ on the Rue Jacob.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... This has been a good year for the late Cuban writer: earlier this year his principal novels were reprinted (From Cuba with a Song, Cobra, Maitreya), and now this autobiographical collection of essays, perhaps his most personal and accessible...

My City: A Hongkong Story.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... My City is the first novel (originally published in 1979) by one of Hong Kong's foremost but least-known writers. Xi Xi (pronounced as in Cantonese, "See See") offers a highly personal vision of her city that will almost certainly confound any...

What the Night Tells the Day.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Hector Bianciotti is a consummate tongue snatcher - a novelist and literary critic who successfully switched from Spanish into French to reach an audience more sympathetic, more akin to his artistic dilemma. His memoir, What the Night Tells the...

Degenerative Prose: Writing Beyond Category.
September 22, 1995... It's precipitate to declare something as "writing beyond category," just as other hoping-to-catch-the-trend-wave marketers learned in the late eighties that "dangerous" fiction was a fiction in itself. Nevertheless, there are some categorically...

After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology.
September 22, 1995... I read some of After Yesterday's Crash while half-listening to a CD of Balinese gamelan music - gorgeous stuff, what angels on drugs must listen to - and realized I was exemplifying part of what McCaffery was after in this anthology: we live in a...

Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog.
September 22, 1995... I read some of After Yesterday's Crash while half-listening to a CD of Balinese gamelan music - gorgeous stuff, what angels on drugs must listen to - and realized I was exemplifying part of what McCaffery was after in this anthology: we live in a...

The Sun and Moon Guide to Eating Through Literature and Art.
September 22, 1995... If you are on a strict literary diet, this unusual book is the perfect splurge. In 1988, Douglas Messerli wrote to "several authors of international significance, asking them for a New Year's contribution to Sun & Moon Press in the form of a...

Anais Nin: A Biography.
September 22, 1995... Deirdre Bair's biography is dispassionate if not, at times, critical of Anais Nin's life and work. Of her subject, Bait writes, "she did not understand that a scholar's rigorous appraisal of a writer's work does not automatically equate with the...

Prague: A Traveler's Literary Companion.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... You don't have to have a crush on this capital city of Mitteleuropa to find yourself enthralled with the collection of twenty-four stories editor Paul Wilson has artfully arranged to lead the reader-visitor through Prague on a tour that only...

'Favored Strangers': Gertrude Stein and Her Family.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Although we have superb critical studies on Stein by Sutherland, Bridgman, and Gass - these underline her stylistic "composition as explanation" - we have had to wait for this biography to see another Stein, a "favored stranger" who really...

'Lolita': A Janus Text.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... I fell in love with Twayne's U.S. and British authors series while preparing for my Ph.D. comprehensive exams. This book is part of Twayne's Masterwork Studies Series, brief books that strive to provide general background information and...

Plainwater: Essays and Poetry.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Anne Carson's poetry and essays are such that often it is difficult to tell which is which - the essays have a near perfect command of the rhythms and sounds of sentences. The poetry as well often exhibits an astuteness common in excellent...

Love's Litany: The Writing of Modern Homoerotics.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Desire has got a lot of ink in critical theory recently, but not love, desire's romantic elder. Kevin Kopelson shows how nineteenth-century literary constructions of (heterosexual) love have been adapted by eight key gay and lesbian writers:...

Exact Change Yearbook 1995.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Exact Change's Yearbook #1 consists of a collection of mostly contemporary poetry which shows some affinity to or advance upon the currents of surrealism and dada. Gizzi has been very successful at assembling a wide range of work that represents...