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Can the past yield itself to us more freely as it recedes? Two absorbing debut novels set out to map new terrain within the far-reaching, ever-shifting minefield of writing
related to the Nazi era. Both of these portraits, drawn in starkly contrasting tones, argue with grace and candour for the need to hold and turn over in our hands history's more unlikely protagonists. Told from the periphery of World War II, these two remarkable new works circle towards rather than insist upon the momentous... MORE
on the debut novels of Rachel Seiffert and John Wray
It's almost too easy to claim that Kiran Desai's
debut novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, is the embodiment
of Italo Calvino's values of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility,
and multiplicity. But it needs to be said, for this is no earnest
first novel, no disguised memoir... MORE
on Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by
Kiran Desai
The Kite family, onetime mythical daredevils and high artists of the
trapeze, have fallen to earth in post-War England, and their collective
memory has devolved upon a hustler and exhausted illusionist named
Mitchell. He is on a search to recover his mother's life and to escape
the shambles he's made of a seaside club fallen so low that the only
crowd it can muster for a beauty pageant is the crowd of those seeking
his blood... MORE
on The Sword Cabinet by Robert Edric
Pulling out the seventies' titles of Raymond Federman
is almost like reviewing old Beefheart albums--it's not as if they haven't
been in print over the years, but they haven't been given credit for the
amazing (and funny) things they are. ... MORE
on Double
or Nothing by Raymond Federman
Federman's Take It or Leave It eases the
typographical turmoil of Double or Nothing, but torments his narrators--this
time an anonymous someone is standing in front of an unruly audience telling
the story told to him by a young French guy ("Frenchy"), now somewhat older,
making his way out of his military barracks in North Carolina to his planned
great American adventure... MORE
on
Take It or Leave It
by
Raymond
Federman
'Don't be cynical ... I don't like it,' orders
the narrator's mother at one point one in this vigorously misanthropic
debut novel, which made its twenty-three year old author something of a
cause
celèbre when it first appeared in his native Holland...
MORE
on Blue
Mondays by Arnon Grunberg
The eponymous protagonist of John Lanchester's
second novel has lost his job but cannot break the habit of donning a suit
and commuting into the City from his suburban fastness. Thus a day spent
wandering, like a tailored situationist, about a London scarcely noticed
before catastrophe struck... MORE
on
Mr
Phillips by John Lanchester
Artfully packaged to seem longer than it is, Ian
McEwan's Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam provides a gripping, though
brief, read, gleefully tracing the slide from virtue and propriety of an
Establishment composer and his broadsheet Editor friend... MORE
on Amsterdam
by
Ian
McEwan
Whenever a novel hits a dead-end, have a man with
a gun enter the room. That was Raymond Chandler’s declared strategy. In
his third novel Marcel Möring takes a slightly less original approach...
MORE
on In
Babylon by Marcel Möring
This late novel by one of the elder statesmen
of Dutch literature concerns an ageing actor, Bouwmeester, who is called
out of retirement by an experimental theatre company...
MORE
on Last
Call by Harry Mulisch
Victor Pelevin’s The Clay Machine-Gun consists of three strands:
the narrative of Pyotr Voyd, reluctant commissar to a legendary Red commander
during the Russian Civil War; that of a patient in a 1990’s Moscow psychiatric
institute, convinced he is said commissar; and, in a kind of a literalisation
of Buddhist philosophy, a series of narratives wherein characters experience
reality as a flux of mental projections...
MORE
on The
Clay Machine-Gun by Victor Pelevin
To Americans, London's Millennium Dome is more
likely to recall Logan's Run or a football stadium than St. Paul's
Cathedral. It's equally unlikely that many outside of Britain will take
much interest in a critique of it. Iain Sinclair's little tract will only
earn their attention when it comes closest to a rant, satisfying ill-spirited
if universal urges to see great plans collapse and rich men shown for fools...
MORE
on Sorry Meniscus by
Iain
Sinclair
It's as if all the pleasures that should have
saturated the FC2 Reader were drained off by its co-editor Ronald
Sukenick into his, to use a silly word, delightful new novel, Mosaic
Man. From the title on, Sukenick's punning feverishly upon the bible,
(his chapters: Genes, Ex/ode, Umbilicus, Numbers, Autonomy, Profits), to
devise his own "wholly book." ... MORE
on Mosaic Man by Ronald
Sukenick
Tabucchi's work is nowhere more dreamlike than
in this little book, his first written in the language of his adopted home
of Portugal... MORE
on Requiem
by
Antonio Tabucchi
With such a domestic title reeking of the rec
room, it's easy to see how one father/reviewer at Amazon felt himself duped
by Curtis White's recent fevered novel. Yet how appropriate that this book
about killing fathers should be given unknowingly by a daughter to her
dear dad... MORE
on Memories
of My Father Watching TV by
Curtis White |
