culture September 21, 2017

A Broken Story: Jenny Erpenbeck's Refugee Novel

Overseas, Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest novel has carried her to fresh levels of acclaim. She’s won not only the Thomas Mann Prize, in her native Germany, but also Italy’s Strega Europeo, something of a Booker for the Continent. Now the book is out in this country, under the title Go, Went, Gone, and though Erpenbeck’s four previous have won critical esteem—the New York Review of Books deemed her last novel “ferocious as well as virtuosic”—here, too, the new work could well generate broader recognition.

Overseas, Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest novel has carried her to fresh levels of acclaim. She’s won not only the Thomas Mann Prize, in her native Germany, but also Italy’s Strega Europeo, something of a Booker for the Continent. Now the book is out in this country, under the title Go, Went, Gone, and though Erpenbeck’s four previous have won critical esteem—the New York Review of Books deemed her last novel “ferocious as well as virtuosic”—here, too, the new work could well generate broader recognition.

Go, Went, Gone tackles an issue that’s made headlines—namely, the plight of African refugees in

culture July 18, 2017

Amatka by Karin Tidbeck

The work of Swedish fiction writer Karin Tidbeck compels reading for several reasons, not least the intriguing things she does with names. Her first novel in English, termed “speculative fiction” in its publicity materials, sets off speculation with the name of the protagonist alone: Brilars’ Vanja Essre Two. Granted, most of the time this young woman is referred to simply as “Vanja.” Still, everyone around her turns out to wear a likewise complicated coat of arms.

Each brief chapter of Amatka occupies a successive day—the whole unfolds over a month, ever more disruptive—yet this calendar

culture April 18, 2017

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

Just when you’re about to do a proper job as critic, assessing Jeff VanderMeer’s latest and looking at his previous, considering, too, his worldwide success and the good it’s done for science fiction generally—just when you’re about to get serious, his new novel, Borne, hits you with the likes of this:

We didn’t see the intruders at first because they were seething up from the underground. . . . But soon enough from our vantage on the roof, looking down to the factory floor through a couple of loose slats, I saw who it was: more poisoned half-changed children.

culture June 03, 2016

The Bastards of Pizzofalcone by Maurizio de Giovanni

The latest novel from Maurizio de Giovanni serves its noir macchiato: flecked with bright Neapolitan detail. A recent drug scandal has smeared the precinct’s reputation and left several officers behind bars. To replace those, law enforcement administration has culled people from around the city, pulling together—what else?—a gang of misfits. Each of the new hires bears an old wound, a painful secret, or both.

In Naples, two men meet for lunch. They squeeze into a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria, above a steep and narrow alley—the sort of space that still defines the old centro—where one declares: “Tell me how anyone can doubt the existence of God after eating a margherita pizza.”

A small joke, fond, the line is typical of the pleasures in The Bastards of Pizzofalcone, the latest book from Maurizio de Giovanni, translated by Antony Shugaar. This novel makes nine in four years, all of them published in English as part of Europa’s “World Noir” series, and all serving their noir macchiato: flecked with bright

culture January 27, 2016

The Unfinished World by Amber Sparks

About halfway into Amber Sparks’s new collection of stories, a “feral” girl cursed by a witch, hiding out in a “wild, ancient wood,” receives an extraordinary visitor. A man “all black hair and sharp lines” drives up in a car that befits him, “sleek and modern.” The girl marvels: “It looked like an industrial beast fleeing unthinkable places, the new cowering from the oldest things in the world.”

About halfway into Amber Sparks’s new collection of stories, a “feral” girl cursed by a witch, hiding out in a “wild, ancient wood,” receives an extraordinary visitor. A man “all black hair and sharp lines” drives up in a car that befits him, “sleek and modern.” The girl marvels: “It looked like an industrial beast fleeing unthinkable places, the new cowering from the oldest things in the world.” The sheer weirdness of the arrival fetches a grin, and whips the narrative around like a sling, taking it from a disturbed fairy tale to a feminist Game of Thrones. The turnabout, we come to understand,

culture September 08, 2015

Scrapper by Matt Bell

The wreck of Detroit has given rise to a new job title, a “scrapper,” who harvests the organs of dead buildings. Their wires and pipes can fetch a decent price. The profession proves well-suited to Bell’s style, which finds odd angles on the ordinary, at times turning it inside out.

The very title of this novel announces a departure for Matt Bell. Scrapper—with its homely brevity and flat vowels—stands in striking contrast to the Biblical roll of Bell’s 2013 In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods. So too, more substantial elements in the new book reveal that its young author is going for something different. The house and lake of the previous novel had no fixed address, unfolding in a nightmare. But Scrapper at once places us in contemporary Detroit, “fifty years an American wreck.” A handful of chapters visit elsewhere, but the stay is always brief and

culture January 13, 2015

Sympathy for the Devil by Michael Mewshaw

Reviewing is easy, but history can be hard. I mean that Michael Mewshaw’s Sympathy for the Devil, his reminiscence of Gore Vidal, proves easy to praise—swift, canny, sensitive, and unafraid. Vidal himself, two years after his death, poses more of a challenge.

Reviewing is easy, but history can be hard. I mean that Michael Mewshaw’s Sympathy for the Devil, his reminiscence of Gore Vidal, proves easy to praise—swift, canny, sensitive, and unafraid. But Vidal himself, two years after his death, poses more of a challenge. Was his accomplishment literary, finally? Or does he owe his status more to his public persona, and his gifts as a well-spoken cultural gadfly? Such celebrity carries its own weight, to be sure; most writers would gladly give up a masterpiece for a fraction of Vidal’s fame. Nonetheless, the nature of that fame ought to be examined,

culture July 29, 2014

In the Wolf's Mouth by Adam Foulds

Each of Adam Foulds’s recent novels suggests a cloud chamber into which some physicist has introduced particles that won’t bond. With In the Wolf’s Mouth, the author ratchets up the conflict considerably. The novel takes place during World War II, primarily in Sicily, where “liberation” only unearths deeper discord, much of it instigated by the Mafia.

Each of Adam Foulds’s recent novels suggests a cloud chamber into which some physicist has introduced particles that won’t bond. In The Quickening Maze (2010), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, he portrays two real-life British poets: John Clare, the son of laborers, who dashes off odes to nature, and Alfred Tennyson, an aristocrat who composes meditations on philosophy and history. These writers couldn’t have stood further apart—and meanwhile other characters introduce additional disagreements—but Foulds makes everything come together. Now, with In the Wolf’s Mouth, Foulds ratchets

culture April 21, 2014

Painted Cities by Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski

The moving, energetic short story collection Painted Cities describes a Chicago neighborhood that is unmoored, and forever straying into violence. It's not the first book to describe how brutally the City of Big Shoulders can smothered its inhabitants. But Galaviz-Budziszewski upsets expectation, relaying hardships at once bruising and yet life-giving.

South and west of central Chicago, there is no 22nd Street. Rather, between 21st and 23rd, the signs read Cermak Road. This thoroughfare follows the Red Line down from the big-money Loop to the threadbare African-American South Side. Roughly halfway between those two poles it crosses Pilsen. The neighborhood’s name derives from the Czech—the people of Chicago author Stuart Dybek—and it has always been an immigrant enclave. In the twenty-first century, the neighborhood is also home to a large community of Hispanics. Thus, the moving, energetic Painted Cities—the debut story collection of a

culture February 11, 2014

Forgiving the Angel: Four Stories for Franz Kafka by Jay Cantor

Jay Cantor doesn’t flinch at the lash of history. His “Stories for Franz Kafka” dwells on Hitler’s and Stalin’s Holocausts, both of which cast a shadow over Kafka and his work. The Prague fabulist was a Communist and a Jew, and though tuberculosis took him in 1924 (he was 42), many of those close to him wound up suffering torture and extermination.

Jay Cantor doesn't flinch at the lash of history. His “Stories for Franz Kafka” dwells on Hitler's and Stalin's Holocausts, both of which cast a shadow over Kafka and his work. The Prague fabulist was a Communist and a Jew, and though tuberculosis took him in 1924 (he was 42), many of those close to him wound up suffering torture and extermination. Cantor sifts the ashes to create these four fictions, to greatest success in the two closing tragedies: The penultimate “Lusk and Marianne” spares no detail of NKVD interrogation or a Gulag compound, and the closer spends most of its time with the

culture October 29, 2013

Mira Corpora by Jeff Jackson

Episodic yet suspenseful, smeared with gutter detritus yet glittering with right-on apercus, Jeff Jackson's debut novel delivers both jolts to the spine and food for thought. It’s a nightmare gallop out of childhood that never arrives at the dawn of maturity. Rather, this coming of age comes undone. Throughout, no motif recurs so often as erasure.

The playwright and the novelist may try to share the same skin, but historically, they haven’t made a good fit. The signature case would be Henry James, all but bankrupted by his work in theater. Going the other way, David Mamet has published two novels that generated nowhere near the excitement of his plays. So just picking up Mira Corpora, the debut novel by the New York dramatist Jeff Jackson, you fret for this still-young talent. He’s with the Collapsible Giraffe company, a group that combines imaginative experiment and philosophic inwardness. The Times listed their Botanica among the “

culture August 21, 2013

Cannonball by Joseph McElroy

Donald Barthelme, according to the biography Hiding Man, offered a bold prediction one evening in 1974. His dinner companions were John Barth and Joseph McElroy, and Barthelme declared that “the smart money” was on McElroy’s novel Lookout Cartridge for the National Book Award.

Donald Barthelme, according to the biography Hiding Man, offered a bold prediction one evening in 1974. His dinner companions were John Barth and Joseph McElroy, and Barthelme declared that "the smart money" was on McElroy's novel Lookout Cartridge for the National Book Award. The smart money proved wrong; Gravity's Rainbow took home the prize. McElroy came up short again in 1987 when he published the thousand-page opus Women and Men, a book that prompted Tom LeClair to hail its author as "the most important now writing in America." In a career of more than half a century, McElroy has never

culture May 21, 2012

Boarded Windows by Dylan Hicks

Boarded Windows must be appreciated as one of those debut novels that strike their own dizzy balance. It’s a rock’n’roll story couched in Proustian delicacy, a Beat reconfiguring of the family that moves towards pomo deconstruction of any reliable relationship—and withal, a hybrid of highly pleasing shape. Indeed, this fiction derives in part from another medium, that of the folk song. Doesn’t Bob Dylan (slyly alluded to here) insist that folk is about mystery, its details like glimpses between boarded windows? And isn’t this Dylan (Hicks, the novel’s author) also a singer-songwriter, with

culture November 11, 2011

Everbody’s Right by Paolo Sorrentino

Had the filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino been born a few decades earlier, he’d have enjoyed widespread Stateside buzz. His 2008 Cannes prizewinner, Il Divo, would’ve been an art-house smash, and this year he would’ve done still better, with the Sean Penn vehicle This Must Be the Place. Nowadays, however, European film must glean the leftovers outside the multiplex, as even a figure like Almodovar struggles for US distribution. Small wonder, then, that a creative spirit like Sorrentino has turned his back on success as defined by the Industry—even in his first novel, Everybody’s Right. The narrative’s

culture April 05, 2011

JUICE! by Ishmael Reed

When Ishmael Reed gets celebrated these days, now that he’s well past age seventy, it’s usually for the work he did decades ago. The novels that enjoy broadest critical approval are Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) and Mumbo Jumbo (1972), two comic and surreal historical revisions. Reed was hailed as the great African-American among our homegrown postmoderns (Thomas Pynchon gave him a tip of the cap in Gravity’s Rainbow), if not our foremost black novelist. Esteem like that no longer flutters around his name, but the author himself was the first to shoo it away. He derided such praise as

culture February 03, 2011

Pacazo by Roy Kesey

Is the sheer bulk of a book worth celebration? Roy Kesey has never gone beyond novella-length before, but his novel, Pacazo, runs more than five hundred pages, bulging with detail and incident, with everything from midnight snacks to invasive insects. It’s a shaggy-dog tale, one that eventually—boldly—invites comparison to its great progenitor, Don Quixote. In cutting a classic wide swath, Pacazo exposes itself to risk, a tricky balance between hilarity and horror. By and large, though, this rangy novel earns its claim to the old knight’s inheritance.

The setting is 1990s Peru, in a backwater

culture November 08, 2010

The Clash of Images by Abdelfattah Kilito

Though these stories begin with a Kasbah gossip, sharp of eye and tongue, and end with the towering rages of an Arab patriarch, The Clash of Images feels remarkably like good news. The first American publication of Abdelfattah Kilito’s fiction presents a Muslim world in the process of transformation, in a North African seaport still under French rule; it reveals how that culture out of the North, embodied in everything from French schooling to Tintin comics, swept away habits of thought that had sustained the Arab Old City for centuries. Yet the mood would never be termed angry, but rather

fiction Sept/Oct/Nov 2009

Joy Decision

An international student is pleased that her professor doesn’t consider himself religious. “Good,” the young woman responds. “I’m nothing, either. I’m a Maghreb Algerian Kabyle Catholic Atheist French Canadian on a student visa.”

Richard Powers always has a lot going on, but he’s never had a vehicle so jam-packed as Generosity: An Enhancement. This student’s rapid-fire border-hopping suits the novelist’s latest, his closest brush with comedy. Not that either the young woman or the book she inhabits lacks for tragedy. Thassadit Amzwar, twenty-three years old, has lost both parents. She herself

John Domini