The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from September 1998

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from September 1998

Dirtying Our Hands: An Introduction to the Fiction of Richard Powers.
September 22, 1998... Richard Powers holds a curious place in contemporary letters. A finalist for the National Book Award, a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant, Powers has garnered...

An Interview with Richard Powers.(Interview)
September 22, 1998... Jim Neilson: If it's all right with you, I thought we could begin by looking at a passage from your first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance: The paradox of the self-attacking observer is this century's hallmark, reached...

Narrative Powers: Richard Powers as Storyteller.
September 22, 1998... In Richard Powers's Operation Wandering Soul, Linda Espera, a rehabilitation therapist on a ward of desperately ill children, regularly reads stories to her charges: "Read-alouds, the oldest recorded remedy, older than the earliest folk salves:...

The Storm of Progress: Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.
September 22, 1998... This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would...

Hooking the Nose of the Leviathan: Information, Knowledge, and the Mysteries of Bonding in The Gold Bug Variations.
September 22, 1998... What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of the leviathan? I have swum through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. --Ishmael, Moby-Dick I learn...

Ecologies of Knowledge: The Encyclopedic Narratives of Richard Powers and His Contemporaries.
September 22, 1998... An encyclopedic "Continuing Education Project" which evolves into a survival lesson on complexity and ecological wisdom, Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations strives to be nothing less than "the universe's User's Manual"--"Not a how-to,...

"The Wheel's Worst Illusion": The Spatial Politics of Operation Wandering Soul.
September 22, 1998... The child learned of the three planes, the shape of time's cycle, and the names of many fixed points in the spinning sphere.(1) Consider the dust jacket: a wheel in motion, its spinning signifying, in childlike fashion, with dashes between...

The Gender of Genius: Scientific Experts and Literary Amateurs in the Fiction of Richard Powers.
September 22, 1998... I told her how specialization left me parochial. --the character "Richard Powers" in Galatea 2.2(1) To ask the question of gender in the fiction of science usually results in two possibilities: recourse to the automatic fact of the...

"The Stereo View": Politics and the Role of the Reader in Gain.
September 22, 1998... "The world sells to us at a loss, until we learn to afford it." Richard Powers, Gain "The act of looking is powerful," Richard Powers told Sven Birkerts in a recent interview, "if you can see the look. And for that you need some...

Finding a Language: Introducing Rikki Ducornet.
September 22, 1998... He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be...

At the Heart of Things Darkness and Wild Beauty: An Interview with Rikki Ducornet.
September 22, 1998... SINDA GREGORY: What kind of books did you read when you were a kid? RIKKI DUCORNET: One of my favorite books was Heinrich Van Loon's Ancient Man, filled with his strange little drawings. Whether he was sketching Neanderthals or Babylonians,...

The Death Cunt of Deep Dell.
September 22, 1998... 1. David Lynch I cherish a particularly eerie moment in David Lynch's Eraserhead when a radiator metamorphoses into a miniature theater and an excessively sentimentalized Thumbelina performs in the void. As lively as she looks, she is an...

Excerpts from Five Novels.
September 22, 1998... In my essay for this issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, I have chosen to write about the Death Cunt in part because it is at the heart of the "gnostic vision" as I see it, and a recurrent theme in my own work. For this reason also, I...

Ducornet and Borges.
September 22, 1998... Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, and Carlos Fuentes, Rikki Ducornet fully understands that writing fiction is essentially the rewriting of other texts. Ducornet apparently learned this important lesson from her mentor Jorge Luis...

Rikki Ducornet's Tetrology of Elements: An Appreciation.(response to article by Rikki Ducornet in this issue)
September 22, 1998... If my mode were analysis rather than appreciation, I'd attempt to place Rikki's work--"Rikki" is the pen name that Erica Ducornet preferred before Chatto and Windus insisted on something more conventional--in relation to that of the writers...

"The Tantalizing Prize": Telling the Telling of The Fountains of Neptune.
September 22, 1998... His knowledge of the story behind all stories is the tantalizing prize he holds up in the half-light again and again and always Just beyond my reach.(1) Although the central story of Rikki Ducornet's 1989 novel The Fountains of Neptune is...

Gender Derision, Gender Corrosion, and Sexual Differences in Rikki Ducornet's Materialist Eden.
September 22, 1998... Rikki Ducornet's novels propose a critique of Western cosmology through a visitation of what were once considered the constitutive elements of the material universe: earth, analyzed in The Stain (1984); fire, in Entering Fire (1986); water, in...

Phosphor in Dreamland.
September 22, 1998... In the preface to his "archeology," The Order of Things, Michel Foucault tells us that that book was inspired by a passage in Borges, in which the entry in a Chinese encyclopedia under Animals divided them into the following categories: "(a)...

Desiring Words.(Review)
September 22, 1998... With five bold, original, and deeply ingenious novels to her credit, as well as several volumes of short fiction and verse, Rikki Ducornet should be regarded as one of the major figures of the American avant-garde. Her latest book will confirm...

The Castle.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Franz Kafka. The Castle. Trans. and preface by Mark Harman. Afterword by Malcolm Pasley. Shocken, 1998. 328 pp. $25.00. This new translation of Kafka's The Castle comes heralded by its publisher as "a Kafka for the twenty-first century," a...

Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas.(Review)
September 22, 1998... William H. Gass. Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas. Knopf, 1998. 274 pp. $24.00. William Gass regularly demonstrates how the artist's devotion is best measured by his concern for the language he cultivates; his scruple and injunction is...

The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Mario Vargas Llosa. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. Trans. Edith Grossman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. 259 pp. $23.00. Erotic fiction in Latin America remains confined to the margins of cultural production. While the reader may find...

Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Efrain Kristal. Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa. Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1998. 256 pp. $34.95. Erotic fiction in Latin America remains confined to the margins of cultural production. While the reader may find...

Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Anne Carson. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. Knopf, 1998. 149 pp. $23.00. Translator, poet, and professor of classics Anne Carson has written a work which challenges many long-held literary oppositions: prose vs. poetry, epic vs....

Loves That Bind.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Julian Rios. Loves That Bind. Trans. Edith Grossman. Knopf, 1998. 246 pp. $23.00. Rios is the author of Poundemonium and Larva: Midsummer Night's Babel--both published by Dalkey Archive--and he now gives us another complex text full of...

Children of Clay.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Raymond Queneau. Children of Clay. Trans. Madeleine Velguth. Sun & Moon, 1998. 434 pp. Paper: $14.95. Raymond Queneau's fifth novel is best known for being the outcome of his lengthy research into the obscure works of French...

The Knife Thrower and Other Stories.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Steven Millhauser. The Knife Thrower and Other Stories. Crown, 1998. 256 pp. $22.00. After winning the Pulitzer for Martin Dressier, Millhauser returns to the short-story genre with a most impressive collection. The stories in The Knife...

Writing.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Marguerite Duras. Writing. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Lumen Editions, 1998. 78 pp. Paper: $14.95. "My books come from this house," Marguerite Duras writes in the title essay of this her last book. "From this light as well, and from the...

The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Charles Bukowski. The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship. Black Sparrow, 1998. Illustrations by Robert Crumb. 144 pp. $27.50; paper: $14.00. These intermittent journal entries (8-28-91 to 2-27-93) provide...

Gemini.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Michel Tournier. Gemini. Trans. Anne Carter. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998. 452 pp. Paper: $15.95. One important question we ask concerning an artist is this: to what degree does his description or interpretation of the world intend to...

Last Love in Constantinople: A Tarot Novel for Divination.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Milorad Pavic. Last Love in Constantinople: A Tarot Novel for Divination. Trans. Christina Pribichevich-Zoric. Dufour, 1998. 184 pp. $23.95. Milorad Pavic cannot help but create a text that extends the conventional boundaries of the novel:...

Identity.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Milan Kundera. Identity. Trans. Linda Asher. Harper Flamingo, 1998. 168 pp. $22.00. Chantal and Jean-Marc take a holiday. After a series of both comic and bitter misunderstandings, but most of all French as in farce, the two grow apart....

Two Cities.(Review)
September 22, 1998... John Edgar Wideman. Two Cities. Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 256 pp. $24.00. In many ways, Two Cities feels like a culmination of Wideman's earlier work, and is especially reminiscent of Philadelphia Fire. In fact, one of the narrative strains...

Jacob, Menahem & Mimoun: A Family Epic.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Marcel Benabou. Jacob, Menahem & Mimoun: A Family Epic. Trans. Steven Rendall. Preface by Warren Motte. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1998. 222 pp. $30.00. This is a book about the book Marcel Benabou was trying to write. Originally Benabou (a...

The Rings of Saturn.(Review)
September 22, 1998... W. G. Sebald. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. New Directions, 1998. 296 pp. $23.95. The narrator of The Rings of Saturn (who both is and is not W. G. Sebald in this combination of fiction, travel writing, historical study, and...

The Everlasting Story of Nory.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Nicholson Baker. The Everlasting Story of Nory. Random House, 1998. 226 pp. $22.00. Nicholson Baker, well-known for his phone-sex novel Vox and his voyeuristic fantasy The Fermata, here attempts what in some ways might be his most risky...

Last Vanities.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Fleur Jaeggy. Last Vanities. Trans. Tim Parks. New Directions, 1998.95 pp. Paper: $11.95. Jaeggy's novel, Sweet Days of Discipline, which was published by New Directions in 1993, still haunts me. Although it is about the "sweetness" of...

Thirst.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Ken Kalfus. Thirst. Milkweed Editions, 1998. 205 pp. $16.00. Ken Kalfus dedicates his first collection of fiction to his wife, but he follows her name with thirteen street names, ranging from "Route 202" to "Rue de la Sorbonne" to...

Call Me Ishmael.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Charles Olson. Call Me Ishmael. New afterword by Merton M. Sealts, Jr. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997. 158 pp. Paper: $13.95. In 1938, Charles Olson publishes "Lear and Moby Dick" in Twice-a-Year and months later withdraws from the...

The Collected Stories.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Calvert Casey. The Collected Stories. Trans. John H. R. Polt. Ed. and introduction by Ilan Stavans. Duke Univ. Press, 1998. 193 pp. Paper: $16.95. Duke University Press has done a great service in bringing our attention to the writings of...

Death of a Tango King.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Jerome Charyn. Death of a Tango King. New York Univ. Press, 1998.242 pp. $21.95. This is Charyn's first novel to diverge from his New York series centered on police officer Isaac Sidel. But even here New York gives us our point of...

Rose, Rose, I Love You.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Wang Chen-ho. Rose, Rose, I Love You. Trans. Howard Goldblatt. Columbia Univ. Press, 1998. 183 pp. $22.95. Originally published in 1984, this is the first novel by the noted Taiwanese writer Wang Chen-ho to be translated into English. From...

DunceCap.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Alison Bundy. DunceCap. Burning Deck, 1998. 126 pp. Paper: $10.00. A truly epigrammatic prose can be difficult to pull off in English--not least because it's a French specialty, to which anglophone writers have to find their way indirectly....

Perturbation, My Sister.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Kristin Prevallet. Perturbation, My Sister. First Intensity, 1997. 80 pp. Paper: $10.00. In its preface, this book offers itself as a reading of surrealist Max Ernst's collage novel The Hundred Headless Women (1929). Prevallet defines her...

A German Picturesque.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Jason Schwartz. A German Picturesque. Knopf, 1998. 133 pp. $21.00. A German Picturesque, Jason Schwartz's first book, takes as its central topic the static objectification of what is seen. With many of these stories either devoid of actions...

D-Tours.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Jonathan Baumbach. D-Tours. FC2, 1998. 172 pp. Paper: $12.95. Jonathan Baumbach's tenth work of fiction chronicles the Homeric detours of a Hollywood producer making his way back to the lover he left years ago at the Paradise Hotel. Each...

The New Life.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Orhan Pamuk. The New Life. Trans. Guneli Gun. Vintage, 1998. 296 pp. Paper: $13.00. Have you ever read a book that was so overwhelming, so utterly life-changing that' you had to find everyone else who has read it and force it upon those...

Mad Elaine.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Helen Stevenson. Mad Elaine. Anchor/Transworld (Ealing: England), 1998. 236 pp. 9.99 [pounds sterling]. Helen Stevenson's third novel, Mad Elaine, is a hilarious and touching look at the life of a social misfit. An intelligent and...

Cities of the Plain.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Cormac McCarthy. Cities of the Plain. Knopf, 1998. 293 pp. $24.00. The third volume of The Border Trilogy, McCarthy's Cities of the Plain, brings together Billy Parham from The Crossing and John Grady Cole from All the Pretty Horses....

Without.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Randie Lipkin. Without. Fugue State, 1998. 152 pp. Paper: $7.00. I have been eagerly waiting for Lipkin's second novel. It confirms her rare talent. This novel, like her first one, Untitled (a skier), is a daring, wise, beautiful...

Possessions.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Julia Kristeva. Possessions. Trans. Barbara Bray. Columbia Univ. Press, 1998. 211 pp. $27.50. I'm afraid that Julia Kristeva's excursion into the genre of the thriller is not terribly thrilling. Possessions returns the reader to the...

My Symptoms.(Review)
September 22, 1998... John Yau. My Symptoms. Black Sparrow, 1998. 203 pp. $27.50; paper: $15.00. Throughout My Symptoms male and female narrators surprise us with unusual, shifting colloquialisms, with playfully enlivened cliches, pleasing turns of phrase such...

Malpertuis.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Jean Ray. Malpertuis. Trans. and introduction by Iain White. Atlas, 1998. 172 pp. Paper: $16.99. The new English translation of Malpertuis, a novel of gothic delights by Jean Ray first published in France in 1943, offers a sojourn to a...

The Explanation and Other Good Advice.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Don Webb. The Explanation and Other Good Advice. Woodcraft of Oregon, 1998. 120 pp. Paper: $9.95. The Explanation and Other Good Advice, Don Webb's latest collection of short fiction, promises and delivers dreams worth dreaming, where the...

The Woman Watching.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Paola Capriolo. The Woman Watching. Trans. Liz Heron. Serpent's Tail, 1998. 214 pp. Paper: $13.99. The eponymous woman of Paola Capriolo's new novel is watching a play about the life of Casanova; an actor known to us only as Vulpius has a...

Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Patricia Duncker. Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees. Ecco, 1998. 197 pp. $22.95. With this, her first collection of stories, Patricia Duncker returns to the sun-drenched French settings and themes of love and power that characterized her...

365 Views of Mt. Fuji: Algorithms of the Floating World.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Todd Shimoda. 365 Views of Mt. Fuji: Algorithms of the Floating World. Illustrated by L. J. C. Shimoda. Stone Bridge, 1998. 356 pp. $19.95. What's striking about 365 Views of Mt. Fuji is this first novel's very look. Bordering the main...

Microgravity.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Beth Partin. Microgravity. Livingston, 1998. 128 pp. Paper: $9.95. In her first novel, Microgravity, Beth Partin provides a smart investigation into both the realm of cults and the realm of the mind by exploring the societal structures that...

The Automatic Message.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Philippe Soupault. The Automatic Message. Trans. David Gascoyne, Antony Melville, Jon Graham. Introduction by Gascoyne and Melville. Atlas, 1997. 223 pp. Paper: $16.99. An old maxim has God worrying over what...

Dog Days.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Aidan Higgins. Dog Days. Secker & Warburg, 1998. 286 pp. 15.99 [pounds sterling]. This middle volume of a trilogy which began with Donkey's Years (1995) and will conclude with The Whole Hog dwells mainly on the winters of 1985 and 1986,...

Mary Butts: Scenes From the Life.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Nathalie Blondel. Mary Butts: Scenes From the Life. McPherson, 1998. 553 pp. $35.00. Mary Butts is, perhaps, the most obscure of major modern writers. Although she wrote wonderful fiction, she was also a brilliant critic admired by readers...

Crimes of the Beats.(Review)
September 22, 1998... The Unbearables. Crimes of the Beats. Autonomedia, 1998. 223 pp. Paper: $12.00. By and large, the growing corpus of academic scholarship on the Beat writers has not been matched by writers' own critical reappraisals of the American '50s....

Wormholes Essays and Occasional Writings.(Review)
September 22, 1998... John Fowles. Wormholes Essays and Occasional Writings. Ed. and introduction by Jan Relf. Henry Holt, 1998. 416 pp. $25.00. This volume offers a selection of Fowles's nonfiction from 1964 up to 1997, presented under four thematic headings...

Keeping Literary Company: Working with Writers since the Sixties.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Jerome Klinkowitz. Keeping Literary Company: Working with Writers since the Sixties. State Univ. of New York Press, 1998. 226 pp. $24.50. To set the record straight: Jerome Klinkowitz, when he was a young professor at Northern Illinois...

Namedropping: Mostly Literary Memories.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Richard Elman. Namedropping: Mostly Literary Memories. State Univ. of New York Press, 1998. 277 pp. $24.50. To set the record straight: Jerome Klinkowitz, when he was a young professor at Northern Illinois University and I was an even...

School of Stupidity.
September 22, 1998... We have received numerous complaints and letters of concern from readers that no one was elected to the School of Stupidity in the last issue of the Review. As with everything in life, there is a story behind this. Although the Committee...