The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from September 2008

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from September 2008

The esthetic structure of the sentence.(discussion on sentence formation and grammar)
September 22, 2008... Decades ago, when I was in the Grades, the teacher of composition would occasionally go to the blackboard and write there a sentence of some appropriately simple kind for her students to worry like cats with their prey--for example, "The man at...

The subtle genius of the novel.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... Literature, particularly fiction, conspires to human freedom: in this way it has a political effect. But the vision projected by literature, its implicit philosophy, sits opposite the political understanding of the world. Let's begin with...

Absolute beginners.(a group of college litterateurs who conducted readings at a place called Temple of Zeus)(Essay)
September 22, 2008... In the old days on the Cornell campus there thrived a literary oasis, now coarsely revamped, called the Temple of Zeus, where, amid mythic statuary and urns of parboiled coffee, litterateurs met and talked. (It should have been named the Temple...

The sutured subject.(discussion on experimental writing)(Essay)
September 22, 2008... That for me writing is conversation is no doubt linked to early militant years, when many of us could not, would not, separate the struggle for changing the world from the struggle for finding the appropriate language to engage that world. My...

Musing.(discussion on public readings made by writers)(Essay)
September 22, 2008... Public readings can be tricky affairs. There's nothing more calculated to cause a gritting of the teeth, a shudder of the spirit or even a rising of the gorge than to be voluntarily confined in a Function Room to endure an hour-long ranting by...

Continents kept hidden: the music of Alban Berg.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... for Markus Hinterhauser Each of us constitutes a self-enclosed world, carrying the entire cosmos inside ourselves in infinitely numerous variations, and compressed form, wherever we go. We might also call ourselves planets or planetoids:...

The fools of time.(discussion on western models of achievement and western artists in old age)(Essay)
September 22, 2008... "Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay..." William Butler Yeats "Lapis Lazuli" Max Eastman was in his eighties when I was in my twenties; we met on Martha's Vineyard and grew close. He...

From western to novel: on the transposition (or encounter?) between genres.(effect of watching a movie on a writer's desire to write)(Essay)
September 22, 2008... Film, Aesthetic Happiness, and the Desire to Write Film has always been able to, and always does, influence my imagination; or rather my imagination articulates cinema loosely, flexibly, into the act of writing--it's difficult to figure out...

Onirism.(avant-garde movement in Romanian literature)(Essay)
September 22, 2008... Before the war, avant-garde movements in Romania were quite numerous and varied, ranging from expressionism and constructivism to futurism and Dadaism. Naturally, surrealism was also present among these movements, though the Romanian version...

Jean Rolin's explosion.(L'Explosion de la durite)(Essay)
September 22, 2008... Just as a matter of observation, it is a curious tale that hinges upon the rupture of a radiator hose. Yet that is precisely the case in Jean Rolin's L'Explosion de la durite (The explosion of the radiator hose, 2007), the chronicle of a trip...

After the silence: The non-eventfulness of Bulgaria's communism, and its personal stories.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... I'll begin this essay with a text message that I recently received from an acquaintance, regarding a petition to bring the Bulgarian archives in Moscow back to Bulgaria. This acquaintance explained why she had signed the petition: "It's not...

Dear editor.(humor about writers and writing)(Fictional work)
September 22, 2008... DEAR EDITOR: I had been here before, on another bright autumn day, a long time ago, a very long time ago, as the old stories say. I'd been writing a story about a man, who, on an autumn day, had come to a college football game with his wife and...

Aleksandar Hemon. The Lazarus Project.(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Aleksandar Hemon. The Lazarus Project. Riverhead Books, 2008. 294 pp. Cloth: $24.95. Vladimir Brik intends to write a novel about the senseless murder of Ukrainian Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch by Chicago's chief of police in 1908, the...

Forrest Gander. As a Friend.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Forrest Gander. As a Friend. New Directions, 2008. 192 pp. Paper: $13.95. As a Friend is the short first novel by poet, translator, and essayist Forrest Gander; its four sections, intriguingly, read like chapters from four different books....

Ingo Schulze. New Lives.(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Ingo Schulze. New Lives. Trans. John E. Woods. Knopf, 2008. 608 pp. Cloth: $28.95. Tectonic historic moments like the reunification of Germany in the early 1990s most often await their transcription into literary treatment for generations,...

Julian Rios. Cortejo de Sombras.(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Julian Rios. Cortejo de Sombras. Circulo de Lectores / Galaxia Gutenberg, 2008. 180 pp. Cloth: 18.00 [euro]. If Tamoga is hardly fit for living, it excels as a place to die. In Cortejo de Sombras (Procession of Shadows), Julian Rios...

Heinrich Heine. Travel Pictures.(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Heinrich Heine. Travel Pictures. Trans. Peter Wortsman. Archipelago Books, 2008. 223 pp. Paper: $17.00. Heinrich Heine's lyric poetry stands as a hallmark of nineteenth-century German literature, nestled between the twin pillars of...

C-F Ramuz. The Young Man from Savoy.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... C-F Ramuz. The Young Man from Savoy. Trans., intro., and afterword Blake Robinson. Host, 2008. 148 pp. Cloth: $25.00; Paper: $15.00. Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (1878-1947) seems underrepresented on U.S. shores--in Switzerland he appears on the...

Deb Olin Unferth. Vacation.(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Deb Olin Unferth. Vacation. McSweeney's, 2008. 216 pp. Cloth: $22.00. Vacation, Deb Olin Unferth's first novel, is a witty, lyrical, hybrid mystery with no crime and no suspects. Characters follow one another through apartments, city...

James Kelman. Kieron Smith.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... James Kelman. Kieron Smith, Boy. Harcourt, 2008. 432 pp. Cloth: $26.00. Kieron Smith, Boy, a first-person account of several years in a young boy's life, is surely James Kelman's finest work. He has long been a genius at rendering the...

Paul West. The Shadow Factory.(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Paul West. The Shadow Factory. Lumen, 2008. 182 pp. Cloth: $23.00. For anyone beguiled by the power of words, the most terrifying moment in Kafka occurs early in The Metamorphosis. Late for once to work, Gregor Samsa voices an eloquent...

Peter Stamm. On a Day Like This.(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Peter Stamm. On a Day Like This. Other Press, 2008. 229 pp. Cloth: $23.95. "Emptiness was the normal state of things, he had said, nor was it anything he was afraid of--quite the opposite." In his newest novel, out from Other Press, Stamm...

Boris Vian. The Dead All Have the Same Skin.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Boris Vian. The Dead All Have the Same Skin. Trans. Paul Knobloch. Tam Tam Books, 2007. 122 pp. Paper: $18.00. This short novel was the follow-up to Vian's notoriously successful 1947 hoax, I Spit on Your Graves, a pulp thriller published...

Ana Maria Moix. Of My Real Life I Know Nothing.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Ana Maria Moix. Of My Real LifeI Know Nothing. Trans. Sandra Kingery. Latin American Literary Review Press, 2008. 143 pp. Paper: $17.00. With her eloquent prose and unexpected endings, prolific Spanish author Ana Maria Moix offers ten...

Jose Eduardo Agualusa. The Book of Chameleons.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Jose Eduardo Agualusa. The Book of Chameleons. Trans. Daniel Hahn. Simon & Schuster, 2008. 180 pp. Paper: $12.00. The Book of Chameleons, a novel with a title having the ring of tropical kitsch about it, was originally published in 2004 as...

Clarence Major. My Amputations.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Clarence Major. My Amputations. FC2, 2008. 205 pp. Paper: $22.95. Clarence Major has spoken of how his own sense of fragmentation led to his conception of the novel My Amputations, in which a man considers himself aggrieved, his identity...

Harold Jaffe. Jesus Coyote.(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Harold Jaffe. Jesus Coyote. Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2008. 145 pp. Paper: $13.95. Harold Jaffe's novel Jesus Coyote re-appropriates the discourses surrounding the Manson Family, laying bare the ideology of the dominant culture. Beginning...

Thomas Christensen, ed. New World/New Words: Recent Writing from the Americas.(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Thomas Christensen, ed. New World/New Words: Recent Writing from the Americas. Foreword Gregory Rabassa. Center for the Art of Translation, 2007. 248 pp. Paper: $18.95. Translation is recognized as a discipline, but often paid lip service...

W. Gilbert Adair. The American Epic Novel in the Late Twentieth Century: The Super-Genre of the Imperial State.(Book review)
September 22, 2008... W. Gilbert Adair. The American Epic Novel in the Late Twentieth Century: The Super-Genre of the Imperial State. Foreword Joseph Tabbi. Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. 285 pp. Cloth: $119.95. These days, surfers proclaim a killer wave to be "epic"...

Books received.
September 22, 2008... Amdahl, Gary. I Am Death. Milkweed, 2008. Paper: $15.00. (F) Bernieres, Louis de. A Partisan's Daughter. Knopf, 2008. Cloth: $21.00. (F) Bierlein, Stacy, ed. A Stranger Among Us. Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection....