The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from September 2003

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from September 2003

Diane Williams.
September 22, 2003... Reading contemporary American fiction, one may assume that great innovators such as Donald Barthelme, Laura Riding, and Gertrude Stein, among others, have made a negligible impact on the form, which suffers undeniably from inertia. There...

Aidan Higgins.
September 22, 2003... That time, that place, was it all your own invention, that you shared with me? And I too perhaps was your invention. --Aidan Higgins, Helsingor Station and Other Departures More than thirty years ago Aidan Higgins indicated that all of...

Patricia Eakins.
September 22, 2003... Walking the wrong way, I necessarily fall behind not only the vanguard but the army of its imitators. Already I have walked past the prostitutes, trailing the army in rags and rouge. I am gleaning with the naked, scabby beggars behind them,...

Thomas Bernhard. Three Novellas: Amras, Playing Watten, Walking.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Trans. Peter Jansen and Kenneth J. Northcott. Foreword Brian Evanson. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003. 174 pp. $25.00. This volume is a welcome addition to the translated oeuvre of one of this century's most important and celebrated (outside...

Janice Galloway. Clara.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Simon & Schuster, 2003. 425 pp. $25.00. This extensively researched biographical novel about concert pianist Clara Schumann requires a supple mind. Accept this as a viable version of Clara's life, and the piano lid of doubt will cease its...

A. B. West. Wakenight Emporium.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... FC2, 2002. 128 pp. Paper: $10.95. Like David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, this book is charming first for its syntax, drawing its effect more from the narrator's voice, her mental stutters and turns of phrase, than from the various...

Nicole Brossard. The Blue Books.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Trans. Larry Shouldice and Patricia Claxton. Coach House, 2003. 352 pp. Paper: $19.95. "She rides eager astride the delible ink." This volume reprints translations of the first three "novels" by a major experimental Quebecois writer,...

Steve Tomasula. VAS: an Opera in Flatland.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Art and design Stephen Farrell. Barrytown/Station Hill, 2003. 367 pp. $34.00. Square is looking for an end to the story he is writing. His mother-in-law wants Square and his wife, Circle, to have a second child and go to the opera (but in...

Yaakov Shabtai. Past Continuous.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Trans. Dalya Bihi. Overlook, 2003. 389 pp. Paper: $16.95. Zikhron Devarim (Remembrance of Things) was first published in 1977, four years before Yaakov Shabtai died at age forty-seven. Past Continuous, its English translation, was published...

Douglas Glover. Elle.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Goose Lane, 2003.205 pp. Paper: $17.95. Based on the true story of a Frenchwoman abandoned on the Isle of Demons during one of Jacques Cartier's colonization trips to Canada in the mid-sixteenth century, Douglas Glover's new novel and its...

Prakash Kona. Streets that Smell of Dying Roses.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Fugue State, 2003.246 pp. Paper: $14.00 "Joy is finite, but grief infinite." So goes the unofficial premise of this hauntingly beautiful and meditative treatise on the aura of the streets, in particular those of Hyderabad, India, not only...

Andrzej Stasiuk. Tales of Galicia.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Trans. Margarita Nafpaktitis. Twisted Spoon, 2003. 140 pp. Paper: $14.00. Tales of Galicia begins with what appear to be separate incidents occurring in the southern Polish hinterland that gradually become interwoven as episodes multiply...

Raymond Queneau. We Always Treat Women Too Well.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Raymond Queneau. We Always Treat Women Too Well. Trans. Barbara Wright. Intro. John Updike. Foreword Valerie Caton. New York Review Books, 2003. 169 pp. Paper: $12.95; Witch Grass. Trans. and intro. Barbara Wright. New York Review Books,...

Sandra Newman. The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Harper-Collins, 2003. 389 pp. $24.95. In a debut novel full of deft twists and unexpected intersections, Sandra Newman's narrative spans a world's worth of exotic locations and manages to weave together plotlines as diverse as germ...

Karl Iagnemma. On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Dial, 2003. 212 pp. $22.95. Iagnemma, who works as a research scientist at MIT, is clearly aware of various scientific investigations into the nature of atomic particles; ethnological surveys of "primitive" societies; the workings of...

Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Fable for Another Time.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Trans. and intro. Mary Hudson. Notes and preface Henri Godard. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2003. $55.00; paper: $25.00. Reading Celine can be an odd experience: one is simultaneously drawn to his masterful and original style and, at times,...

Ira Sher. Gentlemen of Space.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Free Press, 2003.291 pp. $23.00. Ira Sher's excellent first novel, Gentlemen of Space, inscribes itself in the tradition of those works--e.g., Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans-in which, according to the narrative designs of its...

Edmund White. Fanny: a Fiction.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Ecco, 2003. 369 pp. $24.95. Fanny is an extraordinary break from Edmund White's previous work. It purports to be the final book by the prolific Victorian writer Francis Trollope, the uncompleted biography of her friend Francis Wright, a...

Nine of Russia's Foremost Women Writers.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Glas New Russian Writing 30. Trans. Joanne Turnbull, et al. Glas, 2003. 286 pp. Paper: $17.95. Nine is a delightful collection of familiar and unfamiliar names whose considerable range and striking individuality highlight the richness of...

Paul West. Cheops: a Cupboard for the Sun.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... New Directions, 2002.262 pp. $25.95. Cheops is Paul West's twenty-second novel, and as with W. B. Yeats before him, West's muse gets younger and more vibrant with each new book. Once again West wanders into a corner of history, in this...

Michael Schulze. Love Song.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... White Light (www.whitelightpress.com), 2003. 999 pp. $49.95. Consider the villagers who first encounter that mutant creature conjured in the lightning-struck laboratory of Victor Frankenstein, who stand suddenly in the presence of massive,...

Ray Gonzalez. Circling the Tortilla Dragon.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Creative Arts, 2002. 156 pp. Paper: $15.00. Known primarily as a poet (seven books) and an editor (the Bloomsbury Review, twelve anthologies, LUNA), Ray Gonzalez here offers a melange of short-shorts and prose poems that never fail to...

T. C. Boyle. Drop City.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Viking, 2003. 444 pp. $25.95. In this, his ninth novel, T. C. Boyle turns his snarky eye on post-peace, man, pre-Prankster hippiedom. The denizens of Drop City, CA, are, on the surface, what one might expect: high-school dropouts who've...

Millicent Dillon. A Version of Love.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Norton, 2003. 261 pp. $23.95. Marx and Freud may be the two great toppled idols of our age, but what happened to Marx is clearer than what happened to Freud. Dillon's risky and gripping tale takes us back to the 1950s, when Freudian...

Alvin Greenberg. Time Lapse.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Tupelo, 2003. 308 pp. $22.95. For Walter Job, the protagonist of Alvin Greenberg's darkly comic novel Time Lapse, "death is an easy thing to manage. Life is another matter." Walter, an accomplished professor of modern literature, leads a...

Albert Goldbarth. Pieces of Payne.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Graywolf, 2003. 214 pp. Paper: $15.00. Reading Albert Goldbarth is like watching the valedictory address at a university created by a merger between Clown College and MIT. His poetry is aggressively intelligent, full of pratfalls and...

Jean Fremon. Island of the Dead.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Trans. Cole Swenson. Green Integer, 2003. 281 pp. Paper: $12.95. This book is about resemblances and differences, modeling, imitating, shadows, and doubles. It is about lines between one species or genus and another. In particular it is...

Toby Olson. The Blond Box.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... FC2, 2003. 285 pp. Paper: $14.95; Utah. Green Integer, 2003. 493 pp. Paper: $12.95. Toby Olson has always been compelled by the mystery of mystery. Whether investigating the mystery of redemption, the alluring pull of the aesthetic...

Thomas Berger. Best Friends.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Simon & Schuster, 2003. 209 pp. $24.00. Best Friends is Thomas Berger's twenty-second novel and evidence that his ironic, inventive muse remains as vibrant as ever. Without the fanfare that should accompany his brilliant accomplishments,...

Robert Buckeye. The Munch Case.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Amandla (Box 431, East Middlebury, VT 05740), 2003. 165 pp. Paper: $18.00. Awaiting electroshock therapy, Edvard Munch, painter of The Scream, begins to narrate a series of broken fragments. These fragments juxtapose memory and presence,...

Gerard Donovan. Schopenhauer's Telescope.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Counterpoint, 2003. 306 pp. $25.00. Gerard Donovan's debut novel intertwines dense philosophical ruminations with simple conversational dialogue in a story that reveals humankind's potential for love as well as our potential for evil....

William Owen Roberts. Pestilence.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Trans. Elisabeth Roberts. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003. 214 pp. $19.95. Pestilence is a novel of debauchery and religious excess set in the fourteenth century during the onset of the Black Plague. Religion is the common thread between...

Norman Rush. Mortals.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Knopf, 2003. 715 pp. $26.95. Norman Rush's first book since Mating (1991), Mortals is a rich novel of sexual politics set in Botswana during the early days of the post-Cold War era. Rush's protagonist, Ray Finch, is a contract agent for...

A. L. Kennedy. Indelible Acts.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Knopf, 2003. 191 pp. $23.00. This collection's twelve stories wonderfully capture the motivation, the tangled mechanics of love. It must be read slowly--as slowly as we read the great loves in Swann's Way or The Wings of the Dove. (I do...

Anthony Powell. Venusberg.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Anthony Powell. Venusberg. Green Integer, 2003.253 pp. Paper: $10.95; O, How the Wheel Becomes It! Green Integer, 2002. 188 pp. Paper: $10.95. Anthony Powell is best known for A Dance to the Music of Time, a series of twelve interlinked...

M. John Harrison. Things that Never Happen.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Intro. China Mieville. Night Shade, 2003. 443 pp. Paper: $15.00. Desire and sickness permeate the stories of M. John Harrison. These dreamy visions explore the uncertainty of self, the fragility of the body, and the inevitable spoiling of...

Roberto Pazzi. Conclave.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Trans. Oonagh Stransky. Steerforth, 2003. 231 pp. Paper: $14.95. A pope who seems larger than life has died. Who will replace him? Although this novel starts out as though it were revisiting The Shoes of the Fisherman, it slowly takes on a...

Matt Ruff. Set This House in Order.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... HarperCollins, 2003. 479 pp. $25.95. Subtitled "A Romance of Souls," Matt Ruff's third novel (Fool on the Hill; Sewer, Gas & Electric) is essentially a love story of sorts between two people suffering from multiple personality disorder....

Lidia Yuknavitch. Real to Reel.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... FC2, 2003. 175 pp. Paper: $13.95. Yuknavitch's third collection continues her exploration, in the grand spirit of Acker and Atwood, of feminist and postfeminist issues--with the delight of language, the sensuality of the sentence and...

Uwe Timm. Morenga.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Trans. Jennifer Lyons. New Directions, 2003. 340 pp. $25.95. In 1923 Joyce said, in praise of Hemingway, "He has reduced the veil between literature and life, which is what every writer strives to do." Uwe Timm is to be similarly commended...

Antoine Bello. The Missing Piece.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Trans. Helen Stevenson. Harcourt, 2003. 248 pp. Paper: $14.00. The professional speed-puzzle circuit, having been established by an American billionaire/jigsaw-puzzle enthusiast and promoted to World Series-levels of international...

Sergio Troncoso. The Nature of Truth.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Northwestern Univ. Press, 2003. 259 pp. $22.95. Sergio Troncoso must have had Paul de Man in mind when he wrote his first novel, The Nature of Truth, as he takes up a similar story--that of a German professor whose connection to the Nazis...

Nina Berberova. The Accompanist.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Trans. Marian Schwartz. New Directions, 2003.94 pp. Paper: $11.95. The title character of this slim, spare novel is our narrator, Sonechka Antonovskaya, a young woman of modest means who comes to work for a glamorous opera soprano, Maria...

Marshall Boswell. Trouble with Girls.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Algonquin, 2003. 306 pp. $22.95. Boswell, already well known as the author of one of the most incisive books on the Rabbit tetralogy, here tackles growing up in the late 1970s and eighties. This ground, already well furrowed fictionally,...

J. Robert Lennon. Mailman.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Norton, 2003. 483 pp. $24.95. Although I have not read his earlier novels, I am so impressed by this audacious work that I will immediately order--by mail!--Lennon's three other novels. He has captured not only the tortured mind of mailman...

Nelly Reifler. See Through.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Simon & Schuster, 2003. 148 pp. $21.00. The fourteen stories that make up Nelly Reifler's terrific first collection form a kind of cabinet of fear and wonder in the mind. They achieve this by skillfully fusing aspects of realism,...

Arno Schmidt. Radio Dialogs II.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Trans. and intro. John E. Woods. Green Integer, 2003. 405 pp. Paper: $13.95. This pocket-sized volume is the second of three collecting Schmidt's musings on writers and their works. As one might expect from this most ludic author, one of...

Saul Yurkievich. In the Image and Likeness.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Trans. Cola Franzen. Catbird, 2003. 109 pp. Paper: $11.00. In his poem "Why I Am Net a Painter" Frank O'Hara wonders at a painter friend's matter-of-fact talk about composition: "Yes, it needed something there." Argentinian Saul...

Knut Hamsun. Knut Hamsun Remembers America: Essays and Stories, 1885-1949.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
September 22, 2003... Trans. and ed. Richard Nelson Current. Univ. of Missouri Press, 2003. 155 pp. $29.95. Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) lived and worked in the United States on two occasions in the 1880s and recorded his impressions in a series of newspaper...

Books received.(Bibliography)
September 22, 2003... Abani, Chris. Daphne's Lot. Red Hen, 2003. Paper: $13.95. (F) Alcala, Kathleen. Treasures in Heaven. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2003. Paper: $15.95. (F) Amado, Jorge. Tent of Miracles. Trans. Barbara Shelby Merello. Intro. Ilan Stavans....