The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from September 2001

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from September 2001

Gilbert Sorrentino.
September 22, 2001... He sought by stress upon construction to hold the loose-strung mass off even at the cost of an icy coldness of appearance; it was the first need of his time, an escape from the formless mass he hated. It is the very...

A Gilbert Sorrentino checklist.
September 22, 2001... Fiction The Sky Changes. New York: Hill and Wang, 1966; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986; Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. Steelwork. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970; Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992. ...

The art is the act of smashing the mirror: a conversation with Gilbert Sorrentino.(Interview)
September 22, 2001... The following interview was conducted by mail during the summer and early fall of 1996. It was completed in early 2001. DAVID ANDREWS: In the preface to Something Said you note that you "no longer hold many of the positions taken here; many...

William Gaddis.
September 22, 2001... Most serious readers of contemporary fiction today know William Gaddis's name. Many could identify him as the author of The Recognitions, a predecessor to such massive and difficult fictions as DeLillo's Underworld, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow,...

A William Gaddis Checklist.
September 22, 2001... The Recognitions. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955; New York: Penguin, 1993. J R. New York: Knopf, 1975; New York: Penguin, 1993. Carpenter's Gothic. New York: Viking, 1985; New York: Penguin, 1986. A Frolic of His Own. New York:...

Mary Caponegro.
September 22, 2001... In his review of The Star Cafe and Other Stories Steven Moore places the author, Mary Caponegro, with those writers "who prefer to play the ventriloquist, deploying a variety of voices and styles so that their collections more closely resemble...

A Mary Caponegro checklist.
September 22, 2001... Fiction Collections Tales from the Next Village. Providence: Lost Roads, 1985. The Star Cafe and Other Stories. New York: Scribner, 1990; New York: Norton, 1991. Five Doubts. New York: Marsilio, 1998. The Complexities of...

Margery Latimer.
September 22, 2001... American modernist Margery Latimer (1899-1932) is remembered today only as the first wife of Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer, the lover of leftist poet Kenneth Fearing, or the close friend of Georgia O'Keeffe, yet her early death cut...

A Margery Latimer checklist.
September 22, 2001... "The New Freedom." Reviewer 4 (1924): 139-40. We Are Incredible. New York: Sears, 1928. Nellie Bloom and Other Stories. New York: Sears, 1929. This Is My Body. New York: Cape and Smith, 1930. Guardian Angel and Other Stories. New...

Austerlitz.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... W. G. Sebald. Austerlitz. Trans. Anthea Bell. Random House, 2001. 300 pp. $24.95. The fourth novel by the German expatriate author W. G. Sebald records the life story of Jacques Austerlitz, an eccentric architectural historian born in...

The Complexities of Intimacy.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Mary Caponegro. The Complexities of Intimacy. Coffee House, 2001.220 pp. paper: $14.95. The Complexities of Intimacy, which includes four darkly humorous, richly imagined stories and a novella, examines the nuclear family in all its...

The Garden of Secrets.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Juan Goytisolo. The Garden of Secrets. Trans. Peter Bush. Serpent's Tail, 2000. 147 pp. $24.00. Following up his translations of Quarantine and The Marx Family Saga, Peter Bush has rendered into English two more works by the cosmopolitan...

Landscapes of War: From Sarajevo to Chechnya.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Juan Goytisolo. Landscapes of War: From Sarajevo to Chechnya. Trans. Peter Bush. City lights, 2000. 225 pp. Paper: $16.95. Following up his translations of Quarantine and The Marx Family Saga, Peter Bush has rendered into English two more...

Children of Pithiviers.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Sheila Kohler. Children of Pithiviers. Zoland, 2001. 204 pp. $21.00. This novel is an astonishing, seductive, sinister nocturne. The narrator returns in her memory to a small town in France she knew when she was turning eighteen. She...

A Larger Sense of Harvey.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Dimitri Anastasopoulos. A larger Sense of Harvey. Mammoth, 2001. 413 pp. paper: $18.00. A Larger Sense of Harvey is a challenging, multilayered--structurally and thematically--first novel. The work is a book of parts: selections from...

Two Murders in My Double Life.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Josef Skvorecky. Two Murders in My Double Life. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 175 pp. $22.00. Josef Skvorecky's new novel is playful in form, pitting two story lines against each other to create effects at once tragic and comic,...

Dark Back of Time.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Javier Marias. Dark Back of Time. New Directions, 2001. 336 pp. $26.95. When explaining "dark back" near the end of the novel, the narrator--a character named Javier Marias--explains that it is "the kind of time that has not existed, the...

Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Jose Manuel Prieto. Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. Trans. Thomas and Carol Christensen. Grove, 2000. 322 pp. $24.00. Prieto tells the hidden story of the cold war's frantic swan song. Like Nabokov in Sebastian Knight, he gives...

The Procedure.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Harry Mulisch. The Procedure. Trans. Paul Vincent. Viking, 2001. $24.95. Harry Mulisch, a Dutch writer of considerable international stature, perennially shortlisted for the Nobel, writes old-fashioned novels of ideas or, more...

So Vast the Prison.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Assia Djebar. So Vast the Prison. Trans. Betsy Wing. Seven Stories, 2001. 363 pp. Paper: $16.95. The fragmented narrative of So Vast the Prison offers spaces of light--views between the bars, the breaks between segments. Ostensibly, Isma,...

Blake's Therapy.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Ariel Dorfman. Blake's Therapy. Seven Stories, 2001. 175 pp. $21.95. Most of Ariel Dorfman's work to date has addressed the detrimental effects of dictatorships upon the body and mind (Hard Rain, Konfidenz, Death and the Maiden), but in...

My Name Is Red.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Orhan Pamuk. My Name Is Red. Trans. Erdag Goknar. Knopf, 2001. 413 pp. $25.95. Colors figure prominently in this historical mystery, set in sixteenth-century Istanbul, which takes us into the lives of a handful of miniaturist painters, one...

Fixer Chao.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Han Ong. Fixer Chao. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 377 pp. $25.00. Playwright Han Ong's first novel tells the story of two twenty-first-century confidence men: Shem C., a frustrated writer bent on scaling Manhattan society or, failing...

Embers.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Sandor Marai. Embers. Trans. Carol Brown Janeway. Knopf, 2001. 224 pp. $21.00. The General--scion of an old Hungarian family, the son of an Officer of the Guards who was the Emperor's friend--awaits his old friend Konrad, whom he has not...

Love's Death.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Oscar van den Boogaard. Love's Death. Trans. Ina Rilke. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 152 pp. $20.00. Boogaard's fifth novel (his first to be translated into English) is ultimately about loss: of life, family, love, and self. Spanning...

The Heart Is Katmandu.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Yoel Hoffman. The Heart Is Katmandu. Trans. Peter Cole. New Directions, 2001. 144 pp. $22.95. This is the fourth volume by Hoffman published in the last few years. It confirms that he is the most interesting and experimental novelist in...

Big As Life: Three Tales of Spring.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Maureen Howard. Big As Life: Three Tales of Spring. Viking, 2001. 225 pp. $23.95. Big As Life is the second book in Maureen Howard's projected tetralogy about the seasons, the first of which was 1998's A Lover's Almanac. Big as Life is...

The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... J. T. LeRoy. The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things. Bloomsbury, 2001. 247 pp. $23.95. It's rare to be shocked, especially by a work of fiction, in an age of violent spectacle, when revolting images are as close as a few clicks of a...

The Museum of Useless Efforts.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Cristina Peri Rossi. The Museum of Useless Efforts. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2001. 159 pp. Paper: $15.00. The museum in Peri Rossi's title story is a library of thick, encyclopedic volumes cataloging by year thousands of "useless efforts."...

The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Benjamin Anastas. The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 277 pp. $24.00. Benjamin Anastas's first novel, An Underachiever's Diary, is a sweet, sad, hilarious, and perversely triumphant "memoir,"...

The Savage Night.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Mohammed Dib. The Savage Night. Trans. C. Dickson. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2001. 191 pp. Paper: $20.00. Mohammed Dib's collection of thirteen stories vividly exemplifies the author's haunting narrative style. A prominent Algerian literary...

Mind the Doors: Long Short Stories.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Zinovy Zinik. Mind the Doors: Long Short Stories. Trans. and adapted by Bernard Meares, Andrew Bromfield, and the author. Context, 2001. 192 pp. $21.95. Zinovy Zinik's zanily comic portraits of Russian exiles who share a mordant...

In the City of Shy Hunters.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Tom Spanbauer. In the City of Shy Hunters. Grove, 2001. 504 pp. $26.00. William Parker (aka William of Heaven) comes to New York (the Wolf Swamp) to find his lover/blood brother Charlie 2Moons (Fred) who has disappeared from the MFA...

The Hermitage.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Marie Bronsard. The Hermitage. Trans. Sonia Alland with the author. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2001. 69 pp. Paper: $14.95. She writes this letter to him through the night. She has been writing to him ever since he left, ten years before....

Love in Vain: Selected Stories.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Federigo Tozzi. Love in Vain: Selected Stories. Trans. and intro. Minna Proctor. New Directions, 2001. 164 pp. Paper: $14.95. Tozzi's name won't be found heading many encyclopedia articles, but he was by all accounts a prolific and...

Homecoming.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Caren Gussoff. Homecoming. Serpent's Tail, 2000. 154 pp. Paper: $14.00. At the thematic core of this complex, intriguing, multilayered work is the notion that observation is possession. What the first-person narrator, Katey, is looking for...

The Works and Days of Svistonov.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Konstantin Vaginov. The Works and Days of Svistonov. Creative Arts, 2001. 161 pp. Paper: $14.95. Originally written in 1929 and here translated into English for the first time, Vaginov's novel follows Andrey Svistonov, a fictional writer,...

The Funeral Party.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Ludmila Ulitskaya. The Funeral Party. Trans. Cathy Porter. Schocken, 2001. 160 pp. $18.95. In this novel, her first in English, Ulitskaya chronicles events surrounding the death of Alik, a Russian artist living in exile in New York, with...

In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Ana Menendez. In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. Grove, 2001. 229 pp. $23.00. This collection of short stories vividly captures the intense emotions experienced by Cubans, Americans, and all those caught in between during the long years...

Sputnik Sweetheart.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Haruki Murakami. Sputnik Sweetheart. Knopf, 2001. 210 pp. $23.00. Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami's seventh novel to be translated into English, is less dense and less referenced to pop culture than much of his other work; nonetheless,...

Dirty Havana Trilogy: A Novel in Stories.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Pedro Juan Gutierrez. Dirty Havana Trilogy: A Novel in Stories. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 392 pp. $25.00. Pedro Juan Gutierrez's Dirty Havana Trilogy is a three-part collection of interconnected stories about...

The House on Moon Lake.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Francesca Duranti. The House on Moon Lake. Delphinium Books, 2000. 192 pp. Paper: $13.95 Francesca Duranti's protagonists are intuitive investigators, struggling to make sense of a world that tantalizes and frustrates with elusive,...

Left-Handed Dreams.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Francesca Duranti. Left-Handed Dreams. Delphinium Books, 2000. 176 pp. $20.00. Francesca Duranti's protagonists are intuitive investigators, struggling to make sense of a world that tantalizes and frustrates with elusive, fragmentary...

Grimm's Last Fairytale.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Haydn Middleton. Grimm's Last Fairytale. St. Martin's, 2001. 249 pp. $23.95. Weaving together strands of biography, history, and fairy tale, Middleton creates a novel rich in allusion and mystery. Ostensibly, the book is about the last...

Process.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Kay Boyle. Process. Ed. and intro. Sandra Spanier. Univ. of Illinois Press, 2001. 139 pp. $24.95. Originally written in 1924 and 1925 and lost when sent to potential publishers in New York, Process has finally been published in an...

Emerald Germs of Ireland.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Patrick McCabe. Emerald Germs of Ireland. Harper Collins, 2001. 306 pp. $25.00. If Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho were transplanted to Ireland, scored with a combination of folk and pop melodies, and given a comic twist, you'd have Emerald...

Snow Mountain Passage.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... James D. Houston. Snow Mountain Passage. Knopf, 2001. 317 pp. $24.00. James D. Houston is, unfortunately, something of a secret to many readers. Each of his novels and many of his works of nonfiction, in particular Californians (1982),...

The Fish Can Sing.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Halldor Laxness. The Fish Can Sing. Trans. Magnus Magnusson. Harvill, 2000. 246 pp. Paper: $15.00. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1955 "for his vivid epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland," Halldor Laxness writes in...

The Unknown Sigrid Undset: Jenny and Other Works.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Sigrid Undset. The Unknown Sigrid Undset: Jenny and Other Works. Ed. with intro. Tim Page. Trans. Tiina Nunnally and Naomi Walford. Steerforth, 2001. 406 pp. $30.00. As Tim Page points out in his introduction, every used bookstore in...

The Music at Long Verney: Twenty Stories.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Sylvia Townsend Warner. The Music at Long Verney: Twenty Stories. Ed. Michael Steinman. Foreword by William Maxwell. Counterpoint, 2001. 192 pp. $24.00. This volume gathers previously uncollected stories, which, with one exception, were...

American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction since 1960.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Kathryn Hume. American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction since 1960. Univ. of Illinois Press, 2000. 359 pp. $39.95. The purpose of Kathryn Hume's volume is to juxtapose a series of postwar American novels in order to examine how they...

Manifesto: A century of Isms.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Mary Ann Caws, ed. Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2001. 713 pp. $35.00. These days, when an interviewer suggests that an artist is part of some genre or movement, the preferred response seems to be, "I'm not...

Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Denis Johnson. Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond. HarperCollins, 2001. 238 pp. $27.00. Johnson's reports, which on the surface are journalistic pieces on Montana, Somalia, Liberia, and once-hallowed hippie retreats, confirms...

Books Received.(Bibliography)
September 22, 2001... Adams, Hazard. Home. SUNY Press, 2001. $20.50. (F) Alai. Red Poppies. Trans. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin. Houghton Mifflin, 2001. $24.00. (F) Albahari, David. Bait. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2001. Paper: $14.95. (F) ...