by Charles Holdefer

What Did You Do Today? by Anthony Varallo

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.

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by VN Alexander

Zone 23 by C. J. Hopkins

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 →

by Dactyl Review

The Coincidence Plot by Anil Menon

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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by Dactyl Review

A Book with No Author by Brent Robison

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 →

by U.R. Bowie

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

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 →

by VN Alexander

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

Machines Like Me (Nan A. Talese, 352 pages) by Ian McEwan is set in the possible world of the 1980s if Alan Turing had not died in 1954, Kennedy had not been shot in Dallas, and Britain had not won the war in the Falklands. In the story, Open Source information has allowed technological progress to sprint ahead, and the automatization of work is leading, first to high unemployment and then, presumably, to the creation of a universally idle population supported by the labor of machines. The hero, Charlie Friend, has recently purchased a life-like robot named Adam and he and his new love interest Miranda Blacke will together train and condition Adam to develop a personality and consciousness. Continue reading →

by Dactyl Review

Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu, translated by Sean Cotter

In “he Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Louis Borges’s postulates a novel so complex it would become “a labyrinth in which all men would become lost.” Left unfinished by its fictional author, the novel is a legacy emblematic of the innumerable possibilities of existence. For Borges, multitude makes the case for universal elusiveness—a sublimity in extremis.

With celebrated Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu’s massive novel Solenoid, we are deep into Borges territory. Solenoid (Deep Vellum Press, 672 pages) is a chronicle told by an unnamed high school teacher whose Kafkaesque days are spent at public School 86 in Bucharest, “the saddest city in the world.” At night, the unnamed protagonist surrenders himself to the phantasmagoric spell of a “solenoid” buried beneath his house; the solenoid is a strange electromagnetic coil with dimension-bending properties. The solenoid causes the narrator to float above his bed. We learn how the mysterious contraption is built from concepts of Nicholas Tesla and the notion of the hypercube. Later, the solenoid is revealed to be one among an array of solenoids buried throughout the city. Ultimately, the narrator meets a woman with whom he falls deeply in love. In a finale that owes as much to science fiction as James Joyce, the couple, and the entire city of Bucharest, are launched spaceship-like from the surface of the earth, trailing a cone of infrastructure and debris. Continue reading →

by U.R. Bowie

Young Pushkin, by Yury Tynyanov

Yury Tynyanov, Young Pushkin: A Novel

(translated by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush (New York: Overlook/Rookery) 2008, 515 pp.

[the Russian original: Юрий Тынянов, Пушкин (М: Издательство «Правда»), 1981]

Introduction

This is a historical novel, treating the life of Russia’s greatest poet from the year of his birth, 1799, to shortly after he graduated from the Lycée school in Tsarskoe Selo in 1817. Tynyanov’s original plan was to cover all of Aleksandr Pushkin’s life, until his death in a duel in 1837, but the author’s health failed. Beginning in 1935, the novel was serialized, but by 1943 Tynyanov was terminally ill with multiple sclerosis; at the end of that year he died at the age of forty-nine, leaving Part One (“Childhood”) and Part Two (“The Lycée”) completed to his exacting standards. What is Part Three as published here (“Youth”) is clearly in rough draft form, lacking the literary polish of the first two parts (more on this later). Even worse, what would be, say, Parts Four and Five—in which we would meet the mature poet, plus his mature literary works—remained a chimera. Continue reading →

by Charles Holdefer

Drift by Craig Rodgers

Sometimes a novel’s originality is less a matter of affirmation than an act of refusal. Refusal to go along with received ideas of how to tell a story or create verisimilitude or even how words signify. Saying no opens up new space, or at least points towards what has been neglected by complacence.

Craig Rodgers’ Drift (Death of Print, 156 pages) is such a novel. A dystopian tale of a bible salesman named Charlie, it will defy the ingrained expectations of many readers. Plotwise, Charlie has no trouble making a sale: everyone seems to want his product. He has no idea why. Women like Charlie—no struggles there, either. Other characters include a clown on a rampage and a mysterious goon in a dented bowler hat who seems to be following Charlie. There’s a bearded lady, with whom Charlie has sex, and a young boy afflicted by plague who becomes his travel companion. Then the boy steals Charlie’s car. Continue reading →

by Dactyl Review

Forgotten Night by Rebecca Goodman

In Rebecca Goodman’s novel Forgotten Night (Spuyten Duyvil, 296 pages) the unnamed narrator–we will call her N hereafter–is searching desperately but determinedly for a Madame Brissac. The reader is immediately enlisted in the search and will never leave N’s side, not even after putting the novel down. The night of the title may be forgotten, but this novel will remain forever in memory, a touchstone whenever World War I or the Holocaust is recalled.

N is one of those people you are irresistibly drawn to but are wary of. You are afraid for her. She knows that she’s looking for Madame Brissac, a name that has come to her from her grandfather Joseph’s tattered diary of WWI. But N is not an adept seeker, inquiring here and there, assailed by distractions, often in the form of artists of dubious motives. Nor is it clear in the beginning exactly what she hopes to learn from Madame Brissac. Who is Madame Brissac anyway? She would be a descendant of a fellow youth N’s grandfather encountered in 1907 in flight from Romania, where a peasant uprising focused its hatred on Jews. Does N find Madame Brissac? That is for each reader to decide, because Madame Brissac is not merely a person. She is the bearer of N’s hope that out of the senseless carnage of WWI and the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust some meaning will emerge.

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