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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
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