The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from September 1997

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from September 1997

Canis Major: introducing Raymond Queneau.
September 22, 1997... Yes, it could begin this way, right here, just like that [...] in this neutral place that belongs to all and to none... --Georges Perec On 29 October 1976, one day after the funeral of his friend and mentor Raymond Queneau,...

Variations for Raymond Queneau. (poem)
September 22, 1997... I Robert and Manuel lingered, looking at imagery. Are you not ashamed of having tried to lift up a young lady's dress? You know what I said to your father? Mind your own business--and lock up your sisters. Oh, but...

Raymond Queneau (Interviews with George Charbonnier, part 5)(Interview)
September 22, 1997... GEORGES CHARBONNIER: Raymond Queneau, you said to me one day that two great currents exist in literature and that basically one could, if I understood you correctly, link most novels either to the Iliad or to the Odyssey. RAYMOND QUENEAU: I...

Technique of the novel.
September 22, 1997... The rules (of the ancients) are good, but their method is not of our century, and whoever determines to walk only in their footsteps would doubtless make little progress and would entertain his audience poorly. We run, to tell...

From 'Children of Clay.' (excerpt, translated from 'Les Enfants du limon')
September 22, 1997... Damp and naked, Sire Chambernac, headmaster of the lycee of Mourmeche, heard a tap at the bathroom door where he was scrubbing himself for the second time that day, performing a considerable number of ablutions because of the intense...

Charity begins at home. (Raymond Queneau)
September 22, 1997... Each time I read a novel by Raymond Queneau I remind myself that I have yet to do my homework: the author's acknowledged spiritual masters--the Gnostics, Hegel, and Kojeve (whose lectures on Hegel were compiled by Queneau himself)--remain on my...

The art of the novel in 'Saint Glinglin.' (Raymond Queneau)
September 22, 1997... A complex and ambitious work whose composition and writing were spread over nearly fifteen years (Gueule de Pierre [1934]; Les Temps meles [1941]; Saint Glinglin [1948]), Saint Glinglin provokes in readers and critics alike contrasting reactions....

"Interludes" from Raymond Queneau.
September 22, 1997... More than a mere temptation, there is in Raymond Queneau a will to classicism. To approach this ideal, it seems to me that the instrumental rigor characterizing his entire body of work needs to be accompanied by various innovations with a...

Queneau and poetic illusion. (Raymond Queneau)
September 22, 1997... When readers approach Queneau's works, in particular his novels, one well-established idea is very likely in their minds: these novels are poems. The reason for this is simple: Queneau himself placed it there. In 1950, in the celebrated and...

Translating Queneau. (Raymond Queneau)
September 22, 1997... Everyone who knows Queneau's work knows that he was a unique writer, a polymath with a vast range of interests and talents, a man who put into practice his profound belief that prose is no different from poetry. His poetic prose is composed of...

The birth of a form: elementary morality. (includes selected bibliography on Raymond Queneau and selected English translations of his works)
September 22, 1997... @1 I shall begin by speaking of a poetic form which is called elementary morality. @2 Beginning is not without its problems. One needs to know where and with what? Above all, what should be the form of the beginning? @3 I really...

Carole Maso: an introduction and an interpellated interview.
September 22, 1997... a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind --Adrienne Rich, "Planetarium" Carole Maso came late both to writing and to the teaching of writing. Although she...

Except joy: on 'Aureole.' (writing the novel)
September 22, 1997... Aureole celebrates the resplendence of language and desire. It is a work of reverie and ruin. Pleasure. Oblivion. Joy. A place where we are for a little while endlessly possible, capable of anything, it seems: fluid, changing, ephemeral,...

Traveling light, from 'The Bay of Angels.' (fiction excerpt)
September 22, 1997... Flying. Flying not falling anymore and starlings. Rising. Larkspurs in the parlor. Rising not falling, floating, one wish. So many birds up here. Angels. A blur of wings. Listen: a distant music. If you could make one wish Ava Klein. Flying....

"We will speak and bear witness": storytelling as testimony and healing in 'Ghost Dance.' (Carole Maso)
September 22, 1997... Virginia Woolf published her novel To the Lighthouse, containing that landmark complex portrait of a Victorian mother, Mrs. Ramsay, based upon her mother, Julia Stephen, on the thirty-second anniversary of her mother's death.(1) The primary...

The dead fathers: the rejection of modernist distance in 'The Art Lover.' (Carole Maso)
September 22, 1997... "The emotion of art is impersonal." --T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" "I do not believe in any of the fathers." --Candace, The Art Lover Giotto's Noli Me Tangere ("Don't touch me") is one of...

"There's not one story that will change this": 'The American Woman in the Chinese Hat.'
September 22, 1997... In The American Woman in the Chinese Hat Carole Maso states that she "was interested in investigating the collapse of a belief system and what effect it would have both on subject and language" (Moore 189). The American Woman in the Chinese Hat...

Between the winding sheets: 'The American Woman in the Chinese Hat.'
September 22, 1997... The approximate distance between: Vence, France, and New York City, USA-4080 miles; Vence, France, and Bloomington, IL, USA-4720 miles This is a story of distances; this is a story where distance is critical. The between effect: a word...

A new language for desire: 'Aureole.' (Carole Maso, includes checklist of her work)
September 22, 1997... Sleepers awaking, our grey flesh tingling beneath the warm tongues of sister sun, the old dream stirred; our blood flowed fast now, darkening, already inventing a new language for Desire. --Rikki Ducornet, Vie Complete...

Mason & Dixon.
September 22, 1997... Thomas Pynchon. Henry Holt, 1997. 773 pp. $27.50. In 1990, when, after seventeen novel-less years, Thomas Pynchon published Vineland, old Pynchon hands everywhere moaned: we waited so long for this? This is the successor to Gravity's Rainbow?...

Underworld.
September 22, 1997... Don DeLillo. Scribner, 1997. 827 pp. $27.50. The word underworld suggests many associations: (1) The criminal element of American society (the mobs in the Bronx, including Nick, his bookie father, and their desire to fashion a private world);...

Nightwork.
September 22, 1997... Christine Schutt. Knoft, 1996. 129 pp. $20.00. Buzzing with the hothouse sexual latency of a Sally Mann or Jock Sturgess nude, the stories in Christine Schutt's debut collection inhabit a dangerous space between incest, fear, and desire. Many...

Reading in the Dark.
September 22, 1997... Seamus Deane. Knoft, 1997. 246 pp. $23.00 Deane's first novel arrives in the wake of the numerous volumes of poetry and criticism which have gained him an international reputation as an original, complex, and sometimes controversial writer and...

American Nomad.
September 22, 1997... Steve Erickson. Henry Holt, 1997. 256 pp. $25.00. Steve Erickson's imaginative documentary of the 1996 Presidential election began when Rolling Stone hired him to report on the campaign as if it were a novel. The magazine's editors quickly...

The Untouchable.
September 22, 1997... John Banville. Knopf, 1997. 367 pp. $25.00. Banville writes novels which question the truths of biography: his historical novels about Copernicus, Newton, and Kepler subvert usual conceptions. The Untouchable, his most recent novel, is another...

Blindsight.
September 22, 1997... Herve Goebert. Trans. James Kirkup. George Braziller, 1996. 119 pp. $20.00. Herve Goebert, is best known for his works dealing with AIDS (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life and The Compassion Protocol)--dead-pan accounts of his grappling...

Longer Views.
September 22, 1997... Samuel R. Delany. Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1996. 342 pp. $50.00; Paper: $22.00. Atlantis: Three Tales. Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1997. 212 pp. $24.95. We witness a strange period in which it seems that, at the same time the canon of approved, proper...

The Crab Nebula.
September 22, 1997... Eric Chevillard. Trans. Jordan Stump and Eleanor Hardin. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1997. 126 pp. $35.00: Paper: $12.00. The celestial Crab nebula, in the constellation Taurus, is the debris of a supernova observed in 1054 and the source of...

Gut Symmetries.
September 22, 1997... Jeanette Winterson. Knopf, 1997. 223 pp. $22.00 Winterson's latest novel compares favorably with her previous work, particularly her brilliant Sexing the Cherry. Gut Symmetries is an alchemical blend of multiple narrators, fairy-tale allusions,...

School Days.
September 22, 1997... Patrick Chamoiseau. Trans. Linda Coverdale. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1997. 146 pp. Paper: $13.00. In School Days Patrick Chamoiseau (winner of the 1992 Prix Goncourt) recounts with bitter charm his introduction to the Colonial education in the...

Purple America.
September 22, 1997... Rick Moody. Little, Brown, 1997. 298 pp. $23.95 In a traditional allegory characters stand in for their qualities. Goodness, Courage, and Charity stride about, going head-to-head and hand-to-hand with their well-known evil twins. In both The...

Awaiting Oblivion.
September 22, 1997... Maurice Blanchot. Trans. John Gregg. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1997. 86 pp. $26.00. Blanchot is a terrifying writer. The action takes place in a hotel room; a man and woman make cryptic remarks about such subjects as waiting, writing, time, and...

Slander.
September 22, 1997... Linda Le. Trans. Esther Allen. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1996. 156 pp. Paper: $14.00. In Slander, Linda Le's fifth novel, a young writer, with obvious resemblances to the author, seeks information from her mad uncle concerning her unknown...

Holy Smoke.
September 22, 1997... Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Overlook, 1997. 329 pp. $24.95. A self-professed cigar aficionado, Infante chronicles the history of his first love, tobacco, from its discovery by a skeptical Colombus to its eventual acceptance as a worldwide vice....

Interior Designs.
September 22, 1997... Sherril Jaffe. Black Sparrow Press, 1996. 240 pp. $25.00; paper: $14.00. Literally and symbolically, Interior Designs is about interior and exterior designs. Its form parallels its content: it is divided into four major sections, each with...

Guided Tours of Hell.
September 22, 1997... Francine Prose. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 1997. 241 pp. $23.00. To the list of recent--and classic--books tracing the moral adventures of Americans in Europe we must add the two novellas collected together under the title Guided Tours of...

Leave It to Me.
September 22, 1997... Bharati Mukherjee. 288 pp. Knopt 1997. $23.00. Bharati Mukherjee's ninth novel, Leave it to Me, resembles a Hollywood thriller fantasy: an orphan, adopted by a hardworking, religious couple in upstate New York is transformed from Debby...

The Dog King.
September 22, 1997... Christoph Ransmayr. Trans. John E. Woods. Knopf, 1997. 355 pp. $24.00. Christoph Ransmayr's The Dog King portrays the mythic, vulnerable, and often violent town of Moor, a microcosm of post-W.W. II Germany. Essentially, he presents a defeated...

Van Gogh's Bad Cafe: A Love Story.
September 22, 1997... Frederic Tuten. William Morrow, 1997. 163 pp. $20.00. "Art finally undecorated by sentiment, free from human rhetoric--art pure"--such is the ideal espoused by Ursula, photographer, morphine addict, and lover of the Dutch painter in Frederic...

Gould: A Novel in Two Novels.
September 22, 1997... Stephen Dixon. Henry Holt, 1997. 277 pp. $24.00. The strength of these two connected novellas, "Abortions" and "Evangeline," lies in their stimulating treatment of two familiar themes: the mutual deceptions of lovers and the anxieties of...

Time Famine.
September 22, 1997... Lance Olsen. Permeable Press, 1996. 324 pp. $12.95. The time is the twenty-first century. Lance Olsen's America is a corporate-owned wasteland where poverty and social marginalization have provoked riots that are quickly and efficiently...

Frenzy.
September 22, 1997... Percival Everett. Graywolf, 1997. 165 pp. $12.95. This novel is a brave attempt to define and to employ frenzy. Frenzy is a synonym for ecstasy, rapture, epiphany--that "still point" in which the human suddenly sees the superhuman and also...

Flying Home and Other Stories.
September 22, 1997... Ralph Ellison. Ed. John F. Callahan. Random House, 1996. 179 pp. $23.00. This collection of stories shows Ellison becoming the masterful writer of Invisible Man; its stories reveal Ellison's great gift for communicating not only the...

Her Other Mouths.
September 22, 1997... Lidia Yuknavitch. House of Bones, 1997. 120 pp. Paper: $8.95. Lidia Yuknavitch's first collection of stories is a collision between language and the body. Slowing down to gaze unflinchingly at the wreckage, her stories examine the wounds...

After Rain.
September 22, 1997... William Trevor. Viking, 1996. 213 pp. $22.95. Because he has published twenty-two books--short-story collections, novellas and novels, certainly, but also plays, nonfiction, and a children's book--because he has won such prestigious prizes as...

The Driftless Zone: Or a Novel Concerning the Selective Outmigration from Small Cities.
September 22, 1997... Rick Harsch. Steerforth, 1997. 201 pp. $21.00. The title of Harsch's first novel refers to a demographic theory: small cities lose their most ambitious, talented, and beautiful natives to the lure of larger cities. The "high percentage of...

Ciphers.
September 22, 1997... Paul Di Filippo. Permeable Press, 1997. 541 pp. Paper: $16.95. Cyril Prothero, a fragile-minded but really lovable schlemiel and clerk at Planet Records in Boston, comes across a zincless-middled penny minted in Arizona and then a barcode on a...

The Three-Arched Bridge.
September 22, 1997... Ismail Kadare. Trans. John Hodgson. Arcade, 1997. 184 pp. $21.95. The narrator of The Three-Arched Bridge, a monk by the name of Gjon, begins his story by writing that he will attempt to tell the "whole truth' and in so doing "record the lie we...

The Aguero Sisters.
September 22, 1997... Cristina Garcia. Knopf, 1997. 300 pp. $23.00. In Cristina Garcia's second novel history haunts the present, threatening to overwhelm the two Cuban sisters who struggle in different ways to let the past enter their lives in manageable but honest...

Fugitive Pieces.
September 22, 1997... Anne Michaels. Knopf, 1996. 304pp. $23.00. In Fugitive Pieces Anne Michaels offers the story of the poet Jakob Beer, a Jewish survivor of World War II. Instead of exploring the places and routes that have normally come to be associated with the...

Hallucinating Foucault.
September 22, 1997... Patricia Duncker. Ecco, 1997. 175 pp. $21.00. Patricia Duncker's first novel explores the relationship between readers and writers as a love affair, as the unnamed narrator, who seeks to rescue a mad, homosexual French novelist from...

Hotline Healers.
September 22, 1997... Gerald Vizenor. Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1997. 172 pp. $21.95. Casting about to describe Hotline Healers, one might say it's a little postmodern, a little magic realist, a little picaresque, a lot parodic, an American Indian trickster story--or...

Dewey Defeats Truman.
September 22, 1997... Thomas Mallon. Pantheon, 1997. 355 pp. $24.00. Many people remember the hubris of Republicans in the fall of 1948 when they convinced, or thought they convinced, everyone that Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of New York, would be the next...

Unravelling.
September 22, 1997... Elizabeth Graver. Hyperion, 1997. 346 pp. $22.95. "Nothing leaves you; things just shake and tumble and return," realizes Aimee Slater, the narrator of Elizabeth Graver's first novel, Unravelling. Set in nineteenth-century New England,...

Sporting with Amaryllis.
September 22, 1997... Paul West. Overlook, 1996. 158 pp. $19.95. The publication of any new work by Paul West is cause for celebration, and celebrate we should over Sporting with Amaryllis. Here West turns his indefatigable imagination to John Milton, and as he did...

Girls.
September 22, 1997... Frederick Bush. Harmony Books, 1997. 288 pp. $23.00. "You can't say once upon a time to tell the story of how we got where we are," says Jack, a forty-two-year-old security guard at a tony private college in a small upstate New York town and...

Urban Oracles.
September 22, 1997... Mayra Santos-Febres. Nathan Budoff and Lydia Platon Lazaro. Brookline Books, 1997. 129 pp. Paper: $15.95. In her collection of short stories Mayra Santos-Febres distances herself from the power she exercises over her characters and the...

Crowning the Queen of Love.
September 22, 1997... Susan Welch. Coffee House Press, 1997. 230 pp. Paper: $13.95. The connection between needing to find love and identity in a fragmented, disturbing world provides the thematic core of Susan Welch's first collection of short stories. These nine...

Winter's Edge.
September 22, 1997... Valerie Miner. Afterword by Donna Perry. Feminist Press, 1997. 203 pp. Paper: $10.95. With its new edition of Winter's Edge (1984), Feminist Press makes widely available an early and difficult to find novel by Valerie Miner, a writer now well...

Blood and Milk.
September 22, 1997... Sharon Solwitz. Sarabande, 1997. 236 pp. Paper: $13.95. A rendezvous with the "sense of unresolvable ambiguity of practically everything" is the cornerstone experience for the characters of Sharon Solwitz's first collection of short stories,...

The Sharp Teeth of Love.
September 22, 1997... Doris Betts. Knopf, 1997. 336 pp. $24.00. One might say that Doris Betts's The Sharp Teeth of Lot,e shows what can happen to a couple on a cross-country trip if they don't have a car radio that works. On the way from Chapel Hill to her wedding...

A Vision of His Own: The Mind and Art of William Gaddis.
September 22, 1997... Peter Wolfe. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1997. 312 pp. $45.00. Why, I wonder, has a great, innovative, and influential novelist like William Gaddis inspired comparatively few critical studies? A quick count in the MLA Bibliography shows...

Ford Madox Ford: The Critical heritage.
September 22, 1997... Frank MacShane, ed. Routledge, 1997. 271 pp. $115.00; Donald Watt, ed. Aldous Huxley: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1997. 493 pp. $145.00. Both of these are reprints, making available again these wonderful collections of criticism that...

Thomas Pynchon: Schizophrenia & Social Control: Papers from the Warwick Conference, Special issue of Pynchon Notes 34-35, Spring-Fall 1994.
September 22, 1997... Eric Cassidy and Dan O'Hara, eds. Special issue of Pynchon Notes 34-35 (Spring-Fall 1994) [1997]. English Dept., Univ. of Wisconsin--Eau Claire, Ean Claire WI, 54702-4004. 224 pp. Paper: $10.00. A few years ago, I had an NEH grant application...

Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory.
September 22, 1997... Michael P. Spikes. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1997. 201 pp. $24.95. This book fills the gap between a dictionary of theoretical terms and an introductory monograph on a particular theorist. There are short chapters on Paul de Man, Henry...

Making the Team: The Cultural Work of Baseball Fiction.
September 22, 1997... Timothy Morris. Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997. 190 pp. Paper: $13.95. There is an old saying about sports fiction: the smaller the ball, the better the writing. Timothy Morris's study of baseball fiction is a very good book and for reasons...

Droles de drames. (Raymond Queneau)
September 22, 1997... One can't, in any case, think of everything... It is by a dire consequence of this lability of the mind that my Notes, or rather "modest proposals" (Temps Meles Documents Queneau, no. 150 + 45-46, 1990: 40) were purged of a bit of...

Emancipating the proclamation: gender and genre in 'AVA.' (Carole Maso)
September 22, 1997... Always she seemed to be listening to the echo of some foray in the blood that had no known setting. --Djuna Barnes, Nightwood In An Atlas of the Difficult World, Adrienne Rich writes: I promised to show you a map you say but...