Whereas we in the west speak of, and see, a “man” on the moon, the Chinese tell stories of and see a rabbit on the moon. Poet, playwright, and editor Joseph Coulson’s great first novel The Vanishing Moon (Archipelago Books, 330 pages) is hardly focused on the moon and yet it is, one might say, focused on the vanishing of beautiful things for which the elusive moon is a most, perhaps the most, romantic emblem: a unique book of pressed wildflowers; the innocence of children playing in the woods before they become conscious of a humiliating poverty; and the exceptional beauty of the unconsummated (preserving the sublime) over the requited (wallowing in the mire) Continue reading
Category Archives: just literary fiction
Black Dogs by Ian McEwan
Rarely does it seem that a great writer is recognized in his time, but Ian McEwan is an exception. Using the trope of two black mastiffs left behind by the Gestapo but still menacing the beautiful French countryside, in Black Dogs (Nan A. Talese, 149 pages) McEwan tells the tale of an older couple June and Bernard Tremaine, living in different countries but still in love. The clever narrator, their son-in-law whose own parents died when he was eight, pieces together the interlacing of the private lives and world events of his adoptive parents from deathbed interviews with once-stunningly beautiful June and her big-chinned rational Marxist politician husband. The action toggles in space and Continue reading
The Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery. Translated by Thomas W. Cushing.
I often wonder about sentences – about their impact, their purity, their necessity of being. I wonder about wasted words, wasted pages, and wasted stories. I wonder every time I read.
Yet, whenever I reach for The Proud Beggars (Black Sparrow Press, 190 pages), I find myself in awe, mesmerized, a captive to Cossery’s mastery of language, his scenes, his characters, and his ideology. If there ever was the perfect literary book, for me, it is this one. Continue reading
The Deadwood Beetle by Mylene Dressler
This wise and gorgeously wrought novel The Deadwood Beetle (Blue Hen Trade, 256 pages) had me by the heart from its first sentence. Tristan Martens, a retired entomologist in his seventies, has discovered by accident the blackened pine sewing table once owned by his mother in the Nazi occupied Netherlands. As he recognizes it in the New York antique shop – “this ghost, this small, lost thing, floating like a piece of impossible wreckage toward me” – he knows he must possess it to keep its secret from the world. The owner Cora Lowenstein, who has misinterpreted the childlike scrawl on the table’s underside, stands in his way. The table Continue reading
The Names by Don DeLillo
DeLillo surely kept a journal while living in Athens and visiting various places in the Middle East and India. He noted scenes, described the climate and vegetation, philosophized on the locals then published his journal as the novel, The Names
discovered that the narrator, who has been described as a Continue reading
Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago
As a reviewer, there are two things you’ll want to know about me before bothering to read further. I only like literary fiction, and I only like literary fiction that’s a bit “difficult,” in one way or another, style or theme, preferably both.
A good theme for me might include controversial social issues, human paradoxes, ethical puzzles– problems to which there are no easy solutions. The concerns of unmarried 32-year-old woman and the plight of a middle-aged man whose affair is petering out are not real “problems,” in my view, nor is the temporary loss of faith in God or humanity. Continue reading
Garner by Kirstin Allio
In the opening pages of Kirstin Allio’s debut novel, Garner (Coffee House Press, 232 pages ), young Frances Giddens is found by the town’s postman drowned in Blood Brook. It is 1925, and the town of Garner, New Hampshire is struggling financially. The postman, Willard Heald, is obviously troubled by Frances’s death even as he labors over his handwritten history of the town. His wife watches him with suspicion, for she suspects him of having harbored a crush on the spirited teenager. The summer boarders staying at the Giddens family’s house remain silent, as do those who lift her body out of the stream. No one dares utter the questions lurking in the reader’s mind: Did Frances kill herself or was she murdered? And why? Continue reading
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss’s astonishing novel The History of Love (W. W. Norton & Company 252 pages), about a manuscript that survives the Holocaust, a flood, broken friendships, a plagiarist, misunderstanding, and obscurity has all the heart and intelligence of the best fiction being published today. Elderly Leo Gursky is afraid of dying unnoticed, and he plans his days so that people will see him and remember him. Among other schemes, he makes a scene in Starbucks and poses nude for a drawing class. Leo wasn’t always this lonely. Decades before, in a small town that was then part of Poland, he fell in love with a girl named Alma. He wrote a book Continue reading
Yellow Dog by Martin Amis
“Male violence did it.” Martin Amis has a bit of a reputation for making sweeping, declarative statements like this one that ends the first paragraph of Yellow Dog (Mirimax, 339 pages). I’ve read all of Amis’ books except Pregnant Widow and Koba the Dread (on my list, next) and I’m very familiar with the Amis conception of gender. I can make sweeping generalizations about his Men and his Women. Continue reading
The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure by Jack Pendarvis
In The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure (MacAdam/Cage Publishing, 183 pages), Jack Pendarvis has the kind of wit that ambushes you – and then bludgeons you until you can no longer suppress the laughter. This collection of nine stories and a novella mocks bad writing and moronic thought through a complete submersion in each, with protagonists believing in absurd premises (like the dead-beat husband who imagines himself as a famous historian and the unemployed drinking buddies who want to be writers without doing the work.) The subtitle – “Curious stories” – Continue reading
Dactyl Review 