The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from September 2000

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from September 2000

Henry Green (1).
September 22, 2000... Henry Green's novels may be the closest thing to pure narrative. Theme--idea content of any sort--matters, but only as a distant ancillary to the business of telling the story. Description figures but slightly, and decreasingly, so that by the...

Henry Green (2).
September 22, 2000... Dale wanted a knife, but, getting up from table, for himself fetched it. And Gates asked to pass bread. Lily stretched for this, but Mr. Dale leaned, he pushed bread forward over to him. When plate of meat was eaten he handed plate to...

Henry Green (3).
September 22, 2000... As realism, this material may seem unprepossessing. The novel, however, is symbolic rather than mimetic in its orientation, and its real subject is a reenactment of the old fairy-tale standard, entry into adulthood and marriage. The enchanted...

Henry Green (4).
September 22, 2000... In Nothing the world seems more matter-of-fact: enchanted green spaces and sinister institutions are dropped in favor of ordinary apartments and eateries. Yet the restaurant to which John Pomfret, Jane Weatherby, their children, and their...

James Kelman (1).
September 22, 2000... James Kelman is among the best known and most celebrated Scottish writers of the post-World War II era, a short-story writer, playwright, and prize-winning novelist whose work is most often compared to that of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and...

James Kelman (2).
September 22, 2000... The situations and settings of the fifty-five short stories collected in these six texts vary, but not to any great degree. On the one hand this may seem to justify Michiko Kakutani's complaint about Kelman's "limited image bank" ("Down and...

James Kelman (3).
September 22, 2000... As Ronnie walks the dog through Glasgow, stopping on his way at the pub (twice), on a park bench, and near the river Clyde, his thoughts range over the difficulty of explaining to Babs why he has bought the dog. He dreams of racing it, but...

James Kelman (4).
September 22, 2000... Shortly after waking on the street, Sammy "made the decision" to ask for handouts so he can get home (3). The police have little patience for Sammy's patter. When one tells him "Move it ya fucking pest," Sammy proceeds with a plan he has...

James Kelman (5).
September 22, 2000... Morgan, Edwin. "Musing on the Buses." Review of The Busconductor Hines, by James Kelman. Times Literary Supplement 13 April 1984: 397. Royle, Trevor. The Mainstream Companion to Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1993. ...

Ariel Dorfman (1).
September 22, 2000... Ariel Dorfman was born on 6 May 1942 in Argentina. His parents gave him the name Vladimiro, after Vladimir Lenin, but Dorfman tells readers of his memoir, Heading South, Looking North, that when he was a nine-year-old boy in the United States,...

Ariel Dorfman (2).
September 22, 2000... We must remember that Dorfman's exile coincided with the rise of poststructuralism, with its attendant influence on the literary form, and of postmodernism, with its radical questioning of any systematic way of understanding the world....

Ariel Dorfman (3).
September 22, 2000... Paulina, a torture victim, is married to Gerardo, who has recently agreed to serve on a truth commission that will investigate the disappearances that resulted in death during the dictatorship. Experiencing car trouble on the way to his house...

Ariel Dorfman (4).(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2000... As I pointed out in the opening, Hard Rain prefigures historical events and specifically imagines the possibility that the Allende period will end badly. In the first section of the novel, which is presented as a review of Con-centrations (a...

Ariel Dorfman (5).(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2000... In The Last Song of Manuel Sendero David is asked by Felipe to change the name of one of the cartoon characters in the strip they are working on from Carl Barks, who really did illustrate for Walt Disney, to Carl Starks. Yet the change of name...

Ariel Dorfman (6).
September 22, 2000... (7) The fact that Gerardo is speaking of another woman also underscores the problem of loyalty and betrayal. Upon release from prison, Paulina returns to their apartment to find Gerardo in bed with another woman. His betrayal stands in stark...

Into and out of Dislocation.(Review)
September 22, 2000... G. S. Giscombe. Into and out of Dislocation. North Point, 2000. 338 pp. $24.00. I want to recommend this book strongly. It offers a decentered, oblique read on the author, his ancestry, and the black diaspora, and it does so in smooth,...

Point and Line.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Thalia Field. Point and Line. New Directions, 2000. 145 pp. Paper: $14.95. Point and Line is the first book by an author industriously working the sparsely populated and as yet underdeveloped borderlands between poetry, fiction, theater,...

House of Leaves.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Mark Z. Danielewski. House of Leaves. Pantheon, 2000. 709 pp. Paper: $19.95. The word-of-mouth is that first-time novelist Danielewski spent ten years working on this book; that he flew out to the Random House offices and worked on...

Midsummer Night.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Uwe Timm. Midsummer Night. Trans. Peter Tegel. New Directions, 2000. 288. Paper: $12.95. While pondering how to start his next novel, the unnamed narrator in Uwe Timm's Midsummer Night is offered a magazine assignment on potatoes: "You're...

Dictionary of Modern Anguish.(Review)
September 22, 2000... R. M. Berry. Dictionary of Modern Anguish. FC2, 2000. 200 pp. $13.95. One truism claims that the ending of any story can only be as good as the rest of the story. Applied to R. M. Berry's Dictionary of Modern Anguish, this amounts to...

Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Daniela Fischerova. Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else. Trans. Neil Bermel. Catbird Press, 2000. 176 pp. $19.95. "The short stories I like best are the ones I understand the least," states one of Fischerova's characters. "And of those, I...

Vertigo.(Review)
September 22, 2000... W. G. Sebald. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. New Directions, 2000. 224 pp. Paper: $23.95. The appearance in English of Sebald's first novel will be warmly greeted by those who know the two later books already translated from the German by...

Krupp's Lulu.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Gordon Lish. Krupp's Lulu. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000. 190 pp. $22.00. Although Lish has been an admirable editor and teacher for more than forty years--he discovered Barthleme, Kesey, Carver, and DeLillo; he dared to print Purdy's I...

The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Antonio Tabucchi. The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro. Trans. J.C. Patrick. New Directions, 2000. 192 pp. $23.95. Tabucchi's latest political thriller shows Portugal in the 1990s facing typical end-of-millennium problems like class...

Buddha's Little Finger.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Victor Pelevin. Buddha's Little Finger. Viking, 2000. 335 pp. $25.95. Pyotr Voyd is one protagonist living in two Russias. He is an accomplished St. Petersburg poet, displaced to Moscow, then hurled into the revolution of 1919, becoming a...

The Royal Family.(Review)
September 22, 2000... William T. Vollmann. The Royal Family. Viking, 2000. 780 pp. $40.00. Vollmann's first novel in six years, The Royal Family chronicles the devolution and degradation of Henry Tyler, an unsuccessful private investigator. Devastated by the...

The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Ingeborg Bachmann. The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. Trans. Peter Filkins. Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999. 233 pp. $26.95. In 1973 Ingeborg Bachmann died in a hotel fire in Rome. She had completed the first novel, Malina, of...

The Temple of Iconoclasts.(Review)
September 22, 2000... J. Rudolfo Wilcock. The Temple of Iconoclasts. Trans. Lawrence Venuti. Mercury House, 2000. 208 pp. Paper: $14.95. Imagining Lives of Eminent Victorians crossed with Mad magazine will give the reader only an inkling of this ironic and...

I Spit on Your Graves.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Boris Vian. I Spit on Your Graves. TamTam Books, 1998. 177 pages. $17.00. With time, most scandalous art mellows into historical curiosity. Lady Chatterley's Lover's dirty bits disappoint eight year olds; it endures mainly as a record of...

City Sister Silver.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Jachym Topol. City Sister Silver. Trans. Peter Zucker. Catbird Press, 1999. 508 pp. Paper: $19.95. Says Jachym Topol: "the tongue I use is one of Czechs, of Slavs, of slaves, of onetime slaves to Germans and Russians, and it's a dog's...

The South and Bene.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Adelaida Garcia Morales. The South and Bene. Trans. Thomas G. Deveny. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1999. 117 pp. Paper: $12.00. These two novellas, originally published in 1985 and only recently made available in English, allow readers a unique...

That Sweetest Wine.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Robert Cabot. That Sweetest Wine. McPherson & Company, 1999. 264pp. $25.00. These three elegiac novellas are primarily concerned with the twin realms of memory and regret. Characters recount their lives and attempt to reconcile traumatic...

The Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Paul West. The Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery. New Directions, 2000. 152 pp. $21.95. West gives us a strange title and subtitle. What exactly does dry Danube mean? Can the Danube be the Danube if it is not wet? And Hitler forgery? Do these...

Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Joseph Heller. Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. Simon & Schuster, 2000. 233 pp. $23.00. Joseph Heller's posthumous Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man is a more fitting and satisfying final work than either his ill-considered...

Being Dead.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Jim Crace. Being Dead. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. 196 pp. $21.00. After Celice and Joseph, the married zoologists at the center of Jim Crace's novel, die in the first paragraph, their bodies spend the rest of the book concealed by the...

Paradise Outlaws: Remembering the Beats.(Review)
September 22, 2000... John Tytell. Paradise Outlaws: Remembering the Beats. Photographs by Mellon. Morrow, 1999. 226 pp. $24.00. It is impossible to imagine the critical recognition of the Beats happening without John Tytell's pioneering 1976 study Naked Angels....

Last Words: The Final Journals of William Burroughs.(Review)
September 22, 2000... William S. Burroughs. Last Words: The Final Journals of William Burroughs. Ed. James Grauerholz. Grove, 2000. 273 pp. $25.00. It is impossible to imagine the critical recognition of the Beats happening without John Tytell's pioneering 1976...

CAUTION: Men in Trees.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Darrell Spencer. CAUTION: Men in Trees. Univ. of Georgia, 2000. 193 pp. $24.95. Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, Darrell Spencer's CAUTION: Men in Trees offers nine mostly first-person stories about men just...

Period.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Dennis Cooper. Period. Grove, 2000. 109 pp. $21.00. Period explores themes and motifs familiar to Cooper's readers. Here again is a world of boys bored with everyday life, stimulating themselves with drugs, sex, and violence; here again is...

Harry Gold: A Novel.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Millicent Dillon. Harry Gold: A Novel. Overlook, 2000. 280 pp. $26.95. Now that the grand theater of the Cold War has been revised into quaint melodrama, acclaimed biographer Millicent Dillon has released an impressive biography-qua-novel...

The Words after Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Carla Harryman. The Words after Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre. O Books, 1999. 112 pp. Paper: $12.00. Carla Harryman, in The Words after Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre, interrogates the...

The Poet Assassinated.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Guillaume Apollinaire. The Poet Assassinated. Exact Change, 2000. 158 pp. $13.59. In this short work from 1916, the founding modernist poet dabbles in autobiography, self-promotion, and prophecy. Less radical than his poems, the prose...

Pastoralia.(Review)
September 22, 2000... George Saunders. Pastoralia. Riverhead, 2000. 188 pp. $22.95. Readers of Saunders's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline should have little trouble recognizing the prefabricated Disneyfied landscape of Pastoralia. The stories in this new collection,...

The Robber.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Robert Walser. The Robber. Trans. Susan Bernotsky. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2000. 141 pp. Paper: $15.00. This remarkable novel (written in 1925) is Walser's last. It is an odd text which unsettles us because it refuses stability. The...

Evolution's Darling.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Scott Westerfeld. Evolution's Darling. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000. 304 pp. Paper: $15.95. It's been some thirty years since Philip K. Dick pointedly asked us Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, ushering in a new age of science...

The Question of Bruno.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Aleksandar Hemon. The Question of Bruno. Doubleday, 2000. 231 pp. $22.95. Many reviewers of The Question of Bruno have been quick to remark on how the author writes in English, his recently adopted language, and even quicker to make...

Sewing Shut My Eyes.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Lance Olsen. Sewing Shut My Eyes. Computer Visuals by Andi Olsen. FC2, 2000. 143 pp. $12.95. In Sewing Shut My Eyes Lance Olsen creates his neocontemporary worlds of cybernetic consciousness to disturbing and hilarious effect. With...

The Music of the Inferno.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Frank Lentricchia. The Music of the Inferno. SUNY Press, 1999. 219 pp. $24.50. The intellectual postmodern novelist faces one central challenge: How is it possible to tell a good story without sacrificing allusion and erudition? Some of...

Under the Skin.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Michel Faber. Under the Skin. Harcourt, 2000. 309 pp. $23.00. Michael Faber's strangely compelling first novel is deliciously creepy--the premise, the deep horror of which unfolds with masterful pacing, is (like most speculative fictions)...

Pilgrim.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Timothy Findley. Pilgrim. HarperCollins, 1999. 486 pp. $25.00. Fans of Canadian writer Timothy Findley's work will find in his newest novel, Pilgrim, some familiar terrain. For starters, Pilgrim takes place in the high Western European...

Nabokov's Butterflies.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, eds. Nabokov's Butterflies. Beacon Press, 2000. 781 pp. $45.00. Although this wonderful book is costly, it is surely worth the price. It is, without doubt, one of the indispensable volumes that every...

Books Received.(Bibliography)
September 22, 2000... Abrams, Tom. The Drinking of Spirits. Livingston Press, 2000. $23.00. (F) Andahazi, Federico. The Merciful Women. Trans. Alberto Manguel. Grove, 2000. $22.00. (F) Argueta, Manlio. A Place Called Milagro de la Paz. Trans. Michael B....

Henry Green.
September 22, 2000... Henry Green's novels may be the closest thing to pure narrative. Theme--idea content of any sort--matters, but only as a distant ancillary to the business of telling the story. Description figures but slightly, and decreasingly, so that by the...

James Kelman.
September 22, 2000... James Kelman is among the best known and most celebrated Scottish writers of the post-World War II era, a short-story writer, playwright, and prize-winning novelist whose work is most often compared to that of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and...

Ariel Dorfman.
September 22, 2000... Ariel Dorfman was born on 6 May 1942 in Argentina. His parents gave him the name Vladimiro, after Vladimir Lenin, but Dorfman tells readers of his memoir, Heading South, Looking North, that when he was a nine-year-old boy in the United States,...

Dictionary of Modern Anguish.
September 22, 2000... R. M. Berry. Dictionary of Modern Anguish. FC2, 2000. 200 pp. $13.95. One truism claims that the ending of any story can only be as good as the rest of the story. Applied to R. M. Berry's Dictionary of Modern Anguish, this amounts to...

Vertigo.
September 22, 2000... W. G. Sebald. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. New Directions, 2000. 224 pp. Paper: $23.95. The appearance in English of Sebald's first novel will be warmly greeted by those who know the two later books already translated from the German by...

The Temple of Iconoclasts.
September 22, 2000... J. Rudolfo Wilcock. The Temple of Iconoclasts. Trans. Lawrence Venuti. Mercury House, 2000. 208 pp. Paper: $14.95. Imagining Lives of Eminent Victorians crossed with Mad magazine will give the reader only an inkling of this ironic and...

Last Words: The Final Journals of William Burroughs.
September 22, 2000... William S. Burroughs. Last Words: The Final Journals of William Burroughs. Ed. James Grauerholz. Grove, 2000. 273 pp. $25.00. It is impossible to imagine the critical recognition of the Beats happening without John Tytell's pioneering 1976...

CAUTION: Men in Trees.
September 22, 2000... Darrell Spencer. CAUTION: Men in Trees. Univ. of Georgia, 2000. 193 pp. $24.95. Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, Darrell Spencer's CAUTION: Men in Trees offers nine mostly first-person stories about men just...