The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from September 2005

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from September 2005

Flann O'Brien.(The Good Fairy, At Swim-Two-Birds)(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... "There is no answer at all to a very good question."--The Good Fairy, At Swim-Two-Birds Beginnings The difficulty with writing about Flann O'Brien's work emerges as soon as one pens the name of the author, itself a most slippery...

Guy Davenport.(Criticism and interpretation)
September 22, 2005... It is no surprise that Guy Davenport admired the work of Henry Darger. Beginning with the landlords who discovered Darger's immense project when they went to clean out his apartment after the artist's death, every discerning viewer who has...

Aldous Huxley.
September 22, 2005... He thought of the millions who had been and were still being slaughtered... he thought of their pain, all the countless separate pains of them; pain incommunicable, individual, beyond the reach of sympathy... pain without sense or object,...

Peter Weiss. The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 1.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Peter Weiss. The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 1. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. Foreword Fredric Jameson. Duke Univ. Press, 2005. 376 pp. Paper: $22.95. Peter Weiss's monumental The Aesthetics of Resistance is a Marxist Remembrance of...

Giorgio Manganelli. Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Giorgio Manganelli. Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels. Trans. and preface Henry Martin. Preface by the author. McPherson, 2005. 214 pp. $24.00. A friend once pointed out the fallacy of describing narratives as circular. A narrative...

Cormac McCarthy. No Country for Old Men.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Cormac McCarthy. No Country for Old Men. Knopf, 2005. 309 pp. $24.95. Over the past forty years, readers of McCarthy have watched as the author modulated his narrative voice, adjusting the contours of his language to fit his stories'...

Robert Walser. Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912-1932.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Robert Walser. Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912-1932. Trans. and ed. Christopher Middleton. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2005. 128 pp. Paper: $15.00. In 1925, before voluntarily retreating to a mental institution for what would prove to be...

Raymond Federman. My Body in Nine Parts.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Raymond Federman. My Body in Nine Parts. Starcherone Books, 2005. 133 pp. Paper: $16.00. Just as there was a space- or atomic-age perspective, it might easily be said that we now look at the world through the lens of biology. This is...

David Antin. i never knew what time it was.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... David Antin. i never knew what time it was. Univ. of California Press, 2005. 175 pp. Paper: $16.95. When Muriel Rukeyser famously asserted, "The universe is made up of stories, not atoms," it was unlikely she was thinking about the kind of...

James Salter. Last Night.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... James Salter. Last Night. Knopf, 2005. 133 pp. $20.00. James Salter's new collection of stories doesn't offer much in the way of new themes; readers familiar with his work won't be surprised to find that many of the stories are about...

Steve Stern. The Angel of Forgetfulness.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Steve Stern. The Angel of Forgetfulness. Viking, 2005. 404 pp. $24.95. This remarkable novel contains the following quotation from the mystical scholar Abraham Abulafia: "The end of forgetfulness is the beginning of remembrance..." If we...

Paul West. My Father's War.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Paul West. My Father's War. McPherson, 2005. 187 pp. $24.00. Since the interminable pontificate of Bill Cosby in the late 1980s, celebrities, usually uncomplicated by something to say, have, well, pontificated on fatherhood, that subgenre...

Patrick Modiano. Missing Person.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Patrick Modiano. Missing Person. Trans. Daniel Weissbort. David R. Godine, 2005. 168 pp. Paper: $16.95. (Reprint) Awarded France's Prix Goncourt in 1978, this existential mystery novel follows a Parisian amnesiac's quest for his own...

Tibor Dery. Love & Other Stories.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Tibor Dery. Love & Other Stories. Various trans. New Directions, 2005. 254 pp. Paper: $17.95. Nazi and Soviet occupation forms the backdrop to these superb stories of ordinary Hungarians struggling with the agents of their oppression....

Ander Monson. Other Electricities.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Ander Monson. Other Electricities. Sarabande Books, 2005. 224 pp. Paper: $14.95. It doesn't take more than a glance at Monson's debut work of fiction to see that its structure is progressive, ambitious. With its various charts, lists, and...

Nicole Brossard. Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Nicole Brossard. Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon. Trans. Susanne De Lotbiniere-Harwood. Coach House Books, 2005. 237 pp. $22.95. A novelist is finishing a book fictionalizing her late father's life, intertwined with memories of her...

Thorvald Steen. "Don Carlos" and "Giovanni.".(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Thorvald Steen. "Don Carlos" and "Giovanni." Trans. James Anderson. Green Integer, 2004. 375 pp. Paper: $13.95. These two short novels take the form of letters written by Giovanni Graciani, an Italian emigre living in Argentina, to his...

Yuri Andrukhovych. Perverzion.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Yuri Andrukhovych. Perverzion. Trans. and intro. Michael M. Naydan. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2005. 326 pp. Paper: $25.95. This novel purports to document the last week in the life of Stanislav Perfetsky, a young Ukrainian poet unexpectedly...

Kenneth Bernard. The Man in the Stretcher.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Kenneth Bernard. The Man in the Stretcher. Starcherone Books, 2005. 285 pp. Paper: $18.00. Although Kenneth Bernard has received several awards for his astonishing plays and stories, he has never received the critical attention that he...

Georges Perec. Three by Perec.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Georges Perec. Three by Perec. Trans. Ian Monk. Intro. David Bellos. David R. Godine, 2004. 192 pp. Paper: $16.95. Godine has done us all a service by making this gem of a collection available domestically under the umbrella of their...

Marianne Hauser. The Collected Short Fiction of Marianne Hauser.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Marianne Hauser. The Collected Short Fiction of Marianne Hauser. FC2, 2004. 292 pp. Paper: $17.95. The twenty-two stories gathered here are taken from throughout ninety-three-year-old Marianne Hauser's nearly seven-decade career--from a...

Eric Chevillard. Palafox.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Eric Chevillard. Palafox. Trans. Wyatt Mason. Archipelago Books, 2004. 136 pp. Paper: $15.00. Wyatt Mason's translation of Eric Chevillard's third novel Palafox elegantly captures the style and whimsy of the French original. Sentences...

Michel Houellebecq. H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Michel Houellebecq. H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. Trans. Dorna Khazeni. Intro. Stephen King. Believer Books, 2005. 150 pp. Paper: $18.00. Any essayist who attempts to explicate and illuminate a writer like H. P....

Jonathan Coe. Like a Fiery Elephant.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Jonathan Coe. Like a Fiery Elephant. Continuum, 2005. 486 pp. $29.95. About his book Trawl, B. S. Johnson wrote, "It is a novel, I insisted and could prove; what it is not is fiction." Johnson's novels--with the exception of House Mother...

Pascale Casanova. The World Republic of Letters.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Pascale Casanova. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Harvard Univ. Press, 2004. 420 pp. $35.00. Like Richard H. Brodhead's Cultures of Letters (1993) and Gisele Sapiro's La Guerre des Ecrivains, 1940-1953 (1999), Pascale...

John Ashbery. Selected Prose.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... John Ashbery. Selected Prose. Ed. Eugene Ritchie. Univ. of Michigan Press, 2005. 326 pp. $29.95. Paper: $19.95 Although I admire striking passages in his poems, I'm not convinced that John Ashbery can be completely interpreted. I agree with...

Brooke Horvath, Understanding Nelson Algren.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Brooke Horvath, Understanding Nelson Algren. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2005. 227 pp. $34.95. Brooke Horvath has written a useful and accessible introduction to Nelson Algren that concentrates on his fiction but also brings in his...

Julian W. Connolly, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov.(Book Review)
September 22, 2005... Julian W. Connolly, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005. 258 pp. Paper: $24.99. To read Nabokov is to be "slain / By the false azure in the windowpane": to come careening into his novels, poems, and stories...

Books received.(Bibliography)
September 22, 2005... Addonizio, Kim. Little Beauties. Simon & Schuster, 2005. $23.00. (NF) Allio, Kirstin. Garner. Coffee House Press, 2005. Paper: $14.95. (F) Ashenhurst, Noah. Comfort Food. Old Meadow, 2005. Paper: $12.95. (F) Aslam, Nadeem. Maps...