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
Two professors of literature, old friends, one in England (RD, our narrator), one having emigrated to Australia (R), are writing letters to each other. This suggests one of the many metaphors in The Trick of It (Viking, 1989, 172 pp.): “Forgotten questions and meaningless answers passing each other somewhere over the Indian Ocean at thirty thousand feet—an image of human communication. Of love and literature and life.” So is this an old-fashioned epistolary novel? Far from it. The Trick of It is a marvelous, sparkling-new one-way-epistolary and modern piece of metafiction. I would rank it right up there with Don DeLillo’s White Noise as one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century. 
Dactyl Review 