Recently added articles from The Review of Contemporary Fiction:
Beyond the terms of commitment: Georges Perec's critique of the literary field, circa 1960.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... From 1958 to 1963, before joining the Oulipo, Georges Perec belonged to a group of young intellectuals who called themselves La Ligne generale, or L.G.--after the film by Sergei Eisenstein--and with which he collaborated on a series of critical investigations committed to "a critique of ...
Commitment or the crisis of language.(Essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... "Old mentors fade. The young Right rises and falls. Innovators rule." (1) This headline from an article devoted to the 1950s captures perfectly the succession of literary tendencies since the Liberation that first privileged Sartre and Camus, then Nimier and Blondin, and finally Beckett, ...
Phago-citations: Barthes, Perec, and the transformation of literature.(Roland Barthes and Georges Perec)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the ...
Perec's Jewishness.(Georges Perec)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Georges Perec's "History of the Lipogram" begins with references to the Zohar, to Rabbi Simeon, to the cabala, and to the three main directions of cabalistic exegesis: gematry, notarikon, and temurah. This majestic demonstration of learning (copied over from Gershon Scholem) ends on a ...
W or The Memory of Childhood.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... W or The Memory of Childhood is a book that only works on the reader's sufferance: it's a kind of torture: a complex machine that makes its reader turn the handle to arrive at something unbearable, a truth which is never said, yet which has to be assumed. Our task is to take over as the ...
The transition from W to M in Life a User's Manual.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... The "classic" palindrome is a great deal different, because in each direction its component letters and signs are identical, although such a symmetry does not of course make them (all) invariable. Only in the sequence does a true symmetry exist; the elements of the sequence are themselves ...
Transformations of constraint.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Let us start with two autobiographical fragments, from W or The Memory of Childhood: <Pre>As for me, I would have liked to help my mother clear the dinnerfrom the kitchen table. There would have been a blue, small-checkedoilcloth on the table, and above it, a ...
Perec's painterly eye.(Georges Perec)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... "The fragile borders which constitute the narow field of all artistic creation have been drawn between Correggio's Anch'io son pittore and Poussin's J'apprends a regarder and the final result of this can only be Silence, that self-willed and self-destructive silence which Kurz imposed upon ...
Horacio Castellanos Moya. Senselessness.(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Horacio Castellanos Moya. Senselessness. Trans. Katherine Silver. New Directions, 2008. 142 pp. Paper: $15.95. In Horacio Castellanos Moya's biting English-language debut, a self-described "depraved atheist" agrees to work in an unnamed country (apparently located in Latin ...
Roberto Bolano. 2666.(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Roberto Bolano. 2666. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. FSG, 2008. 898 pp. Cloth: $30.00. Spanish writer Javier Cercas, a contemporary of Roberto Bolano, once described an overly adulatory critic: "[H]e more or less said there was an immense gulf in universal literature between me and ...
Georges Perec. Cantatrix Sopranica L.: Scientific Papers.(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Georges Perec. Cantatrix Sopranica L.: Scientific Papers. Trans. Antony Melville, Ian Monk, and John Sturrock. Intro. Marcel Benabou. Atlas Press, 2008. 100 pp. Paper: 12.00 [pounds sterling]. The neurological cause for a soprano yelling at her audience when pelted with tomatoes ...
Rudolph Wurlitzer. The Drop Edge of Yonder.(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Rudolph Wurlitzer. The Drop Edge of Yonder. Two Dollar Radio, 2008. 275 pp. Paper: $15.00. Rudolf Wurlitzer's The Drop Edge of Yonder is a metaphysical western, with the emphasis on metaphysics. The novel is thematically invested in various belief systems: Buddhism, Mexican ...
Attila Bartis. Tranquility.(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Attila Bartis. Tranquility. Trans. Imre Goldstein. Archipelago Books, 2008. 292 pp. Paper: $15.00. Andor Weer lives with his mother, Rebeka, a well-regarded stage actress who nearly twenty years before had been informed by the communist authorities that she would no longer play ...
Martha Ronk. Glass Grapes and Other Stories.(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Martha Ronk. Glass Grapes and Other Stories. BOA Editions, Ltd., 2008. 215 pp. Paper: $14.00. In its American literature series, BOA Editions, Ltd. is quietly reimagining fiction--or should I say fictions, for the pieces in Martha Ronk's Glass Grapes and Other Stories don't ...
Heimito von Doderer. Divertimenti and Variations.(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Heimito von Doderer. Divertimenti and Variations. Trans. Vincent Kling. Counterpath Press, 2008. 246 pp. Paper: $17.95. There is something magisterial about these fictions, an old school gravitas that so many relentlessly hip contemporary short stories simply lack. These are ...
Victor Pelevin. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf.(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Victor Pelevin. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. Viking, 2008. 335 pp. Cloth: $25.95. Victor Pelevin goes to extraordinary lengths in his new novel to disarm expectations, beginning with a purported FSB (the former KGB) disclaimer calling it "a symptom ...
Evan Dara. The Easy Chain.(Brief article)(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Evan Dara. The Easy Chain. Aurora, 2008. 502 pp. Paper: $16.95. Evan Dara's The Easy Chain is quite clearly a mess of a novel, but it's the kind of mess Jackson Pollock would have been proud to make. Beneath the glut of unattributed dialogue, stream-of-consciousness from ...
Imre Kertesz. The Pathseeker.(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Imre Kertesz. The Pathseeker. Trans. and afterword Tim Wilkinson. Melville House, 2008. 129 pp. Paper: $13.00. A man and his wife stop at an unnamed town, presumably in Europe, on their way to a seaside holiday. The man--he refers to himself as a guest and then later as ...
Douglas A. Martin. Your Body Figured.(Brief article)(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Douglas A. Martin. Your Body Figured. Nightboat Books, 2008. 160 pp. Paper: $14.95. Douglas A. Martin's ecstatic and devastating narrative verges on what Roland Barthes called the text of bliss. Unlike the text of pleasure, which is refined, delicate and readable in an ordinary ...
Massimo Bontempelli. The Faithful Lover.(Brief article)(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Massimo Bontempelli. The Faithful Lover. Trans. Estelle Gilson. Host Publications, 2007. 210 pp. Cloth: $30.00; Paper: $15.00. Magical realism tends to be associated most closely with Latin American fiction, but according to translator Estelle Gilson, the term had its origins in ...