The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from September 2004

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from September 2004

Editor's note.(Editorial)
September 22, 2004... Two thousand four marks the eightieth anniversary of the birth of William H. Gass--novelist, critic, translator, teacher, master of language. This special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction brings together essays celebrating all these...

A William H. Gass checklist.(Bibliography)
September 22, 2004... Fiction Omensetter's Luck. New York: New American Library, 1966; New York: Penguin, 1997. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. New York: Harper & Row, 1968; Boston: Godine, 1981. Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife. New York:...

The Bowerbirds.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... The Bowerbirds Far from view, below the Blue Mountains, in a grove of blue eucalyptus and Oranges, the bowerbirds nestled in their wreath of twigs: the male, jet, Radiant black, the female alight with gold-green...

On Mrs. Willie Masters.(Short Story)
September 22, 2004... Timing is the essence of the comic. In fact, time itself is comic, nothing funnier. Ha. God. I can barely continue. --Mrs. Willie (Babs) Masters I knew Willie Masters' missus before becoming acquainted with the gentleman himself, knew...

A girandole for Mr. Gass.(Biography)
September 22, 2004... Read anything by William Gass and you bear witness to what great writing is about. Writing that will survive the infamous vicissitudes of time and taste. Incapable of fashioning a dull idea or courting a cliche, he matches the necessary, often...

Lookin' with Gass.(Biography)
September 22, 2004... I have had mentors to die for, the privilege of learning fiction face to face with several of its masters, but one master I knew only on the page, and those pages tutored me exquisitely. That man's name was William Gass, and I made his textual...

About reading.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... What's he like? Often asked hungrily, but with a frown, with the expectation of bad news. The Great Gass, down in his basement offices, tunneled under the old Famous-Barr department store, under Selkirk's auction house, an entity that used to...

Three encounters with Germany: Goethe, Holderlin, Rilke.
September 22, 2004... I. Husband and Wife (Goethe) On getting to know Bill I was amazed about how much more he knew about German literature than I did. True, my professional field wasn't German literature, but neither was his, and being a literary critic and a...

Homage to Bill Gass.(Biography)
September 22, 2004... As the author of some of the most seductively challenging linguistic performances of our time, he makes it exceedingly difficult to answer the simplest questions about his work, such as the question asked a few months ago by my young daughter,...

As sinuous and tough as Ivy.(Biography)
September 22, 2004... Nearly forty years ago, in 1966, his then publisher sent me bound galleys of his first novel, as publishers will, in hopes of testimonial: Omensetter's Luck, by one William H. Gass. Never heard of the chap, although I should have: His fiction...

Toast or corn? Notes I made for this speech and then discarded.(Biography)
September 22, 2004... It's been frequently said that translation is a form of betrayal: it is a traduction, a reconstitution made of sacrifice and revision. One bails to keep the boat afloat. --W.H.G., Reading Rilke The probability of finding grown men...

To His Health.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... To His Health I. Wicked Englishes like his can turn a ton of Aristotle to a lick of trill, or hopes of tryst to histories of trope. He makes of pure excess a palpable necessity. The man is one mean logophile:...

Second is last.(Biography)
September 22, 2004... Well known it is that George Lucas modeled Yoda on Bill Gass: the penetrating gaze, half-lowered lids over protruding eyes, expressive ears, pursed mouth, "umm umm" before oracular speech, predicate before subject, virtuosity with a light...

One beautiful mind.(Biography)
September 22, 2004... At nineteen, when I slouched around the streets of Boston with a copy of Wallace Stevens's Collected Poems in one pocket and Dylan Thomas's in the other, I feasted on Thomas's frisky, hypnotic language and sensuous rigor. But I dined equally on...

Page 399.
September 22, 2004... I shall tell what will not be known by reading the writings of William Gass. To do this I shall interview myself. When did you first meet William Gass? Not very original, Cuoco, but necessary, I suppose. And everybody asks. Early...

William H. Gass meets the -ba particle.(Biography)
September 22, 2004... To Introduce the Writer to the Reader When I was in first grade, Miss Taylor would reward my occasional good work with a gold star, a paper sticker, adhesed to that work. When I was in graduate school (twentieth grade--but who's counting?),...

At-swim among the noble Gasses.(Biography)
September 22, 2004... Amid the charivari of huzzahs and cagey praise that greets Bill Gass's prose, there is always the slur that he remains unapologetically highbrow (a word that has no equivalent in French). You have to wonder at a culture, if such, which thus...

Even Vienna could not forever endure this struggle.(Short Story)
September 22, 2004... For Bill Gass, with much affection I reread what I had written. The climax of their activities was to enter the towns in a spectacular act of revenge against the privileged classes. His face changed. Automatically, his hand went...

The Tunnel: a Small Apartment in Hell.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... Prefatory Note: "The most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime--Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times." These words appear on the cover of every edition of The Tunnel after the first one. I was...

The Moon in Its Flight.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Gilbert Sorrentino. The Moon in Its Flight. Coffee House, 2004. 266 pp. Paper: $16.00. For years I've felt that the title piece of this collection is among the ten best stories in the history of American literature; its availability in...

Tarjei Vesaas. The Boat in the Evening.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Tarjei Vesaas. The Boat in the Evening. Peter Owen Ltd./Dufour Editions, 2004. 184 pp. $19.95. Originally published in 1968, Vesaas's last novel, The Boat in the Evening, is a series of impressionistic vignettes whose coherence emerges...

Halldor Laxness. Iceland's Bell.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Halldor Laxness. Iceland's Bell. Trans. Philip Roughton. Intro. Adam Haslett. Vintage, 2003. 425 pp. Paper: $15.00. Halldor Laxness has fashioned a hilarious, humane tapestry in Iceland's Bell. The novel--rich in plots and subplots, minor...

Ignacio Padilla. Antipodes.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Ignacio Padilla. Antipodes. Trans. Alastair Reid. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004. 132 pp. $18.00. One of the most interesting developments in Latin American literature over the past few years has been the emergence of the Crack group....

Gao Xingjian. Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Gao Xingjian. Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather. Trans. Mabel Lee. HarperCollins, 2004. 127 pp. $17.95. Following the appearance of two novels in English, American readers now have a collection of short stories from the Chinese Nobel...

Peter Esterhazy. Celestial Harmonies.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Peter Esterhazy. Celestial Harmonies. Trans. Judith Sollosy. Ecco, 2004. 844 pp. $29.95. Few novels of recent years even approach the ambition of Celestial Harmonies by Peter Esterhazy. He comes from an ancient aristocratic family whose...

Marcel Benabou. To Write on Tamara?(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Marcel Benabou. To Write on Tamara? Trans. Steven Rendall. Univ. of Nebraska, 2004. 179 pp. Paper: $19.95. The author of Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books and Dump This Book while You Still Can!, Marcel Benabou has created some of the...

David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas. Random House, 2004. 509pp. Paper: $14.95. This book gives the reader full value and then some. Mitchell, with two earlier successful novels, Ghostwritten (1999) and number9dream (2001), has taken a stride...

Russell Hoban. Her Name Was Lola.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Russell Hoban. Her Name Was Lola. Arcade, 2004. 224 pp. $24.00. Hoban is the author of Ridley Walker. That novel--surely one of the most interesting achievements of the last forty years--is a meditation on the postnuclear world and word. He...

Borislav Pekic. How to Quiet a Vampire.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Borislav Pekic. How to Quiet a Vampire. Trans. Stephen M. Dickey and Bogdan Rakic. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2004. 456 pp. Paper $18.95. In Borislav Pekic's brilliantly crafted 1977 novel, the terrible fascination of terror dogs the steps...

Nick Walker. Blackbox: a Novel in 840 Chapters.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Nick Walker. Blackbox: A Novel in 840 Chapters. Perennial, 2003. 311 pp. Paper: $12.95. It's a small world is the phrase oft used to note associative coincidences: unsuspected mutual acquaintances, shared backgrounds, little...

Patricia Laurence. Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Patricia Laurence. Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2003. 488 pp. $59.95. Patricia Laurence had the good fortune to discover, at a Sotheby's auction in 1991, a sheaf of papers...

Books received.
September 22, 2004... Almeida, Germano. The Last Will and Testament of Senhor Da Silva Araujo. Trans. Sheila Glaser. New Directions, 2004. Paper: $14.95. (F) Bachmann, Ingeborg. Letters to Felician. Ed. and trans. Damion Searls. Green Integer, 2004. Paper:...