Ierapetra, or His Sister’s Keeper by Joachim Frank

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In Ierapetra, or His Sister’s Keeper (Canoe Tree Press, 247 pages), Joachim Frank’s splendid new novel, we find ourselves in the company of Reiner and his sister Monika. Reiner has two passions, science and writing. Monika has family and quilting. We accompany them on holiday to Island of Crete. We are immediately immersed in an archetype, innocents abroad in a challengingly unfamiliar culture, in this case two youths from the stern clime of northern Germany transported to the sunny sensuality of the Mediterranean.

The powerful narrative that pulls the reader relentlessly through the novel from beginning to end is familiar. What effect will culture shock have on our siblings while they are in Greece, and will it persist when they return home? Will their old commitments survive? Continue reading →

Son of the Morning, by Joyce Carol Oates

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A man attempting to escape time and being in flesh, a man who does not wish to be, which is, for the most part, what all earthly creatures wish for most fervently: to be. In flesh. But for the most fanatic of religious believers, flesh is a problem. Time is a problem as well, and the most perfervid of believers seek timelessness and fleshlessness. Which is to be found where, other than in Death? One view: such a believer is beloved of the Lord, in that he is willing to renounce all earthly existence in flesh and being to embrace godliness. Another view: a person who refuses to accept the precious gift that God has given him—life in flesh with being in consciousness—is the worst of heretics. Is possibly even in the camp of Satan.

We begin on the first page with a direct address to the Deity by an unknown speaker; we begin with a man in flesh with time on his hands—someone crying out in the wilderness to the Lord. “You have promised that there shall be time no longer. Yet there is nothing but time in the desolation of my soul . . . I don’t want mankind, nor do I want the happiness of the individual without mankind. I want only You . . . There shall be time no longer, yet we are deep in time, and of it; and it courses through us like the secret bright unfathomable blood through our bodies, bearing us along despite our childlike ignorance of its power . . . Save me, O God, by thy name, and judge me by Thy strength and not by my weakness . . . I think of my mother’s broken body and of my father’s swarthy beauty and of my own soul, which drains away in time, minute after minute, even as I compose my desperate prayer to You.” Continue reading →

The Book of Sasquatch by Louis Conte

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Part allegory, part action novel, The Book of Sasquatch (City Bear Press, 230 pages) by Louis Conte views humanity through the eyes of a misunderstood monster.

Flirting with magical realism, this novel gives Big Foot highly-evolved capacities for sight and hearing, allowing him to perceive what humans cannot, while remaining unseen. He mostly surveils human activity through windows and from the trees above. The humanoid can also communicate telepathically with others of his tribe; he can cover ground almost as rapidly as the crow flies, all of which skills make him a near-omniscient narrator, who relates the activities of the townspeople of Deception Falls, as they deal with the consequences of modern development and changes in local demographics.

We can say Sasquatch is a monster insofar as he is prone to let loose his righteous rage against those who harm the powerless. He is a figure of retribution. He is the spirit of the pristine forests of North America. The Big Foot tribe is aligned with Native Americans. Their ancestors took revenge against early settlers who brutally killed their friends and they have walked “in the shadows,” cursed ever since, and banished like Cain. Continue reading →

White Knight by Mara Rotundo

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Mara Rotundo’s debut novel, White Knight (Goldmund, 342 pages), is a love square set against the pandemic, literary fiction with strong elements of romantic domestic suspense and satire. It is a debut only in the sense that it is the first of her extraordinary writing she has allowed us to see. Her bio tells of many short stories and essays locked in a dusty drawer, like Bach’s music waiting to be found in that attic. If we could but read those writings, we would most likely find a step-by-step handbook for the development of a genuine writer, for in this book she springs full-grown from the loins of the muse, armed and dangerous.

For instance, these powerful lines start the romance,

“When her intrepid black eyes sunk their blade into his pudding face, a champagne cork popped somewhere. The earth’s rotation took a hit, the magnetic poles confused each other. She felt him melt, and he let her feel it.”

White Knight is a book of contradictions—a pulp novel love story on the surface. Continue reading →

A Book with No Author by Brent Robison

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If the code, “Brent Robison,” were to undergo a random mutation—which in the writing world we call a typo—more likely than not, that “n” in the first name would jump, as even genes sometimes do, to the last name, where, as “Robinson,” it would create a more stable configuration.  And, of course the now isolated and wobbly “t” in “Bret” would likely undergo reduplication—as giraffe vertebrae have done—leaving us with the better reinforced product “Brett Robinson.”

Such are the circumstances that may lead a man to fancy he has a similarly-named double. If he is a writer of excellent literary fiction, he will take that fancy far. If he also moonlights in some other profession, say, as a photographer or videographer, the twinning can take on multiple dimensions. Continue reading →

What Did You Do Today? by Anthony Varallo

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Fiction labeled magic realism is sometimes too squishy, to my taste, relying too much on novelty or hoped-for charm. Instead of providing an added charge to the storytelling, the other-worldly conceits can bring about a dilution, like a film that leans too heavily on special effects.

In What Did You Do Today? (UNT Press, 216 pages), winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, Anthony Varallo avoids this pitfall across 45 stories that often defy realistic convention. He knows how to strike the right balance between the ordinary and the frankly impossible. Bizarre events occur against a backdrop of everyday domesticity, as parents and children go about their lives.

Continue reading →

Zone 23 by C. J. Hopkins

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In his novel Zone 23 (SS&C Press, 483 pages) expat playwright C.J. Hopkins depicts a society, much like ours at its worse — some six or seven hundred years in the future — when any departures from prescribed ways of thinking are pathologized. Being melancholy, pondering larger philosophical questions, or contemplating the lack of fairness of the system can earn one a diagnosis of mental illness. Virtually everyone is on medication. Those who can’t be controlled by medication are deemed “Anti-Social Persons” and are removed from the society of “Normals” and relegated to various zones of abandoned and bombed-out cities, where they are eventually blown to bits by gamer-controlled drones.

Human reproduction is the central theme. That, too, has been pathologized. Continue reading →

The Coincidence Plot by Anil Menon

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Chances are you’ve never heard of Anil Menon. That’s a shame, but not your fault. Anil Menon is a brilliant Indian author writing wild, brainy and emotionally engaging stories and novels in English. His books, including the main one reviewed here, The Coincidence Plot (Simon & Schuster, 252 pages), are published by presses well known in the English speaking world, and his works can be found in online venues, but readers in the United States who would delight in his novels won’t find them in bookstores.

The Indian Constitution lists Hindi as the official language of the Union, but allows English to continue in use by the government, English being a legacy from British colonial rule. Today India has a growing population of 1.4 billion (it recently surpassed China in this) and of this billion, about 10.5 percent are English speakers. Anil Menon’s work is published for those millions upon millions of English speakers in India. Getting his novels from online sellers or by mail from India can be tedious, but it’s worth the hassle.
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A Book with No Author by Brent Robison

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Like an ancient Buddhist master, Brent Robison is fond of mind benders, and his restless spirit never tires of questioning reality. In his new novel, A Book with No Author (Recital Publishing, 223 pages), Robison’s wicked inquisitiveness is on display out of the gate. In a preface disclaiming Robison’s authorship of the book, he writes, “I, Brent Robison, am not the author of the fragmented story that follows.” Yet, plainly, the book cover bears his name, and the copyright is in place. The hall-of-mirrors never stop from there.

A.J. Campbell discovers a short story in an obscure literary journal that changes his world. But the change is not welcome, because the fiction is based on his life.  He has no idea how the writer could know so much about him, or why he would be the subject of the stories. Worse, his life is messy; divorce, and painful rebuilding. Incensed by invasion of his privacy, he embarks of a difficult task of finding the author who “stole” his life story, and his life.

Yet while the echo-chamber storyline could derail, it always rights itself through the constraints of a gothic detective-thriller plot. We find the narrator earnestly on the trail of his persecutor Continue reading →

There’s Something I Want You to Do, by Charles Baxter

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The Short-Story Novel

There is probably a better term for this, but I don’t know what it is. I refer to a book of short stories, so put together as to feature similar themes and recurrent appearances of the same characters: Charles Baxter, There’s Something I Want You To Do, Penguin Random House, 2015, Vintage paperback, 2016, 221 pp. The result being, if not a novel, at least something resembling a novel. All of the stories in this collection have titles featuring one aspect or another of human character, positive or negative. Part One: bravery, loyalty, chastity, charity, forbearance; Part Two: lust, sloth, avarice, gluttony, vanity. The stories are presented so that—with one exception—each story in Part One has a companion story (same characters) in Part Two.

America in the Twenty-First Century: Full of Somethings Somebody Wants

Quotations from various stories in the collection: “something has happened, I need to say something to you, something was about to happen, something is out there, we’re going somewhere [or nowhere?], something will happen to me, something wants something from me, there’s a thing that’s come up.” And, of course, the line that provides the title of the book: “There’s something I want you to do.” That line appears five times in various contexts. Continue reading →