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Interviews
The Fruits of Parasitism.
Novelist Enrique Vila-Matas might just think literature is a disease and himself a parasite of it. Scott Esposito discusses why this has
let him write some of the most innovative fiction published today.
[more]
What Are Prisons For?
For a few years now America has been the undisputed world leader in incarcerations, and in future years it is likely to only solidify its grip on this dubious
distinction. A sprawling enterprise with 5,000 national outlets and a budget of almost $200 billion, America's current prison system is, in the words of one scholar,
"a leviathan unmatched in human history." University of Arizona Press has published two new memoirs that are quite critical of the state's prisons. One is by a former
inmate, the other by the man who is responsible for the longest-running prison creative writing program in America. [more]
Roberto Bolaño: A naive introduction to the geometry of his fictions.
In Bolaño''s novels, themes, ideas, events, and even characters constantly recur. Javier Moreno has figured out how to fit all the books together. Turns out to be a triangle.
[more]
Déją Vu: On Rereading Catch-22.
How Catch-22 is like a mobius strip
(From the Spring '07 Editon)
The logic of a Catch-22 is also the logic of Catch-22. The novel cycles and re-cycles through a series of incidents: the battle over Bologna, the mission to
Avignon, the time Milo bombed the camp, the forging of Washington Irving's name. Events are endlessly discussed, revisited, relived, both by the characters and by the
narrative itself. Reading it the first time, one is already rereading. Although the book does move forward in the narrative present, we do not seem to progress.
It is a mobius strip. [more]
No Funny Business.
Dan Green on Orhan Pamuk
(From the Spring '07 Editon)
Pamuk, it seems to me, borrows the "grab-bag of postmodern literary devices," the techniques and strategies associated with Western experimental fiction, but never really possesses them as anything more than available avant-garde flourishes given an extra exotic twist by their use in novels about Muslim culture. Postmodern fiction is self-reflexive because it takes as its most immediate subject the very medium of fiction itself, which it subjects to comic self-scrutiny. That fiction is able to re-create reality and convey meaning of a coherent and stable sort is the first assumption such fiction questions. Pamuk wants to use postmodern strategies precisely in order to create meaning, in effect to graft them on to his representations of Turkey's past and present as a way of strengthening these representations, or at least of bringing attention to them beyond the critical consideration conventional realism would be capable of attracting. [more]
From the Winter '07 Editon: M.S. Smith on the Toronto International Film Festival
If the space for innovative cinema has shrunk over the course of two decades, unconquered territories still remain, perhaps even thrive, in the early twenty-first century. International film festivals allow cinephilia to exist, if to smaller degrees; cinephiles who attend, or at least read about festivals, still debate the achievements of contemporary filmmakers and the current state of cinema. In covering film festivals, the cultural press (albeit a minor portion of it) still gives much-needed attention to promising filmmakers from across the globe.
But festivals do something more. As the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival proved, such events are the major open territory for vanguard cinema of all kinds; even if many of the films do not receive wide distribution (or any) in a place as cinematically influential as the United States, their very appearance at festivals is a significant boon to the medium. The great "conversation" of cinema, involving filmmakers who rework the formal and visual languages of their predecessors and cinephiles and critics who argue about cinema, continues. In the age of the Internet and, in particular, of blogging, important films that may not make it beyond the festival circuit receive not only attention, but important critical discussion.
Most of all, the Toronto International Film Festival featured, like those in Cannes and Venice, a considerable number of films that bend, manipulate, ignore, or dissolve the uninspired, stifling standards that have governed filmmaking for far too long.
[more]
The Zak Smith Interview
"In the most important or meaningful way, it's not really a translation. I mean, you wouldn't be able to understand Alice In Wonderland from Tenniel's
illustrations alone--it's the same with GR. And even if you did, the best things in the book--the wonderful turns of phrase and logic--would be lost.
I think it's important to know what my medium CAN'T do so that I'm focusing my energy on the things my medium CAN do.
"Even though my drawings are as faithful to the parts of the text they illustrate as I could make them, the collected pictures are more like a personalized set of
footnotes than a translation." [more]
From the Essays
Section of the Murakami Roundtable
Katie Wadell on Haruki Murakami's Supernatural War
By now, American readers are used to the idea that World War II is symbolic. Ever since the war ended, our novelists have used China, Italy, the Philippines, Dunkirk,
Dresden, and many other battlegrounds to represent everything from the effect of racism on American society to the strength of the American family.
Contemporary Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami introduces us to an altogether more unexpected warfront in novels such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
and A Wild Sheep Chase. His war zone is the barely inhabited Mongolian desert where the war first began, and his wounds are the supernatural and psychic
curses that soldiers bring back to their homeland. The novelist's perspective gives us a new narrative of colonization and war, shaping the bare facts of World War II
into a mysterious and nearly ungraspable sense of the effects it had on the soldiers who fought in it.
[more]
From the Reviews Archive
Derik Badman on Flaubert's
Bouvard and Pecuchet
Gustave Flaubert's last unfinished novel Bouvard and Pecuchet is without question his masterpiece, even in its unfinished state, towering above the more
famous, but less enjoyable, Madame Bovary. This new translation is more readable, less stilted, and a bit more concise in syntax than Penguin's. With an
excellent introduction by Mark Polizzotti and a preface by Raymond Queneau, as well as additional materials related to the unfinished portions of the novel,
this is the edition to read. [more]
Barrett Hathcock on Cynthia Ozick's
The Din in the Head
As good as Ozick is, you may ask What's the point of mere literary essays nowadays? With the world of belles letters quickly moving onto the reservation
of the web; with once-esteemed publications packing up and skipping town, both geographically and ideologically; with blogging creating the only real surge in the
world of book talk, who has the time, nay, the cognitive room, for a few thousand words on Hellen Keller, or early Tolstoy, or Gershom Sholem?
As it so happens, this very question is one of The Din in the Head's enlivening strains. Like "conflagration," the waning of literary attention has become
a personal Ozickian siren song. Call it the Belletristic Blues, but if you do, then know that the tune keeps getting better with each book, not just because hearing
about the good old days is comforting (even if you weren't alive to experience them yourself), but also because it's educational. We need to be reminded that, to pluck
an example from one of the five collections, T.S. Eliot used to have the moral and literary authority (these two weren't even separate) of a high priest, or an A-list
celebrity.
[more]
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Review: Autonauts of the Cosmoroute
by Julio Cortazar.
The concept behind Autonauts of the Cosmoroute is so perfectly Cortazarian in its gamelike setup: Julio Cortazar and his companion Carol Dunlop decide to spend an entire month in 1982 living on the freeway between Paris and Marseille (the "Southern Thruway," which was the name and topic of an earlier Cortazar story), stopping at two rest stops each day and staying overnight at the second. With only 490 miles separating Paris and Marseilles, they don't actually drive for very long on any given day. Using words and pictures, they create a scientific account of their journey, their thoughts, their experiences, of living life in a Volkswagen bus at a snail's pace, discovering the secret pathway right next to this modern creation designed to be experienced at a blur.
It's a mad idea, but not without it's charm. [more]
Review: Exit Ghost
by Philip Roth.
Exit Ghost is purported to be the last Zuckerman novel, and it might just be the last Roth novel too. It seems that in each of his late novels, Roth is running
headlong toward an abyss but pulls up short just before plunging himself and his characters over the edge. And I desperately want him to jump over
the edge. [more]
Review: Vain Art of the Fugue
by Dumitru Tsepeneag.
Reading Romanian writer Dumitru Tsepeneag's Vain Art of the Fugue is like having a dream, and then remembering it in that diaphanous, vague,
next-morning way a dream is recollected. This is a good thing. Maybe if this strange novel means to say anything, it's comparing the experience of music to
the experience of dreams. [more]
Review: Virgin of Flames
by Chris Abani.
Chris Abani's third novel, The Virgin of Flames, is set in the crumbling, beautiful parts of East L.A. where Hispanic and African Americans live. The atmosphere
of dread
and suspense in this apocalyptic landscape is heightened with apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe. A bent and expensive immigration lawyer starts to accept
only donations, "even goats, chickens, and fish," after her shadow is burned into the glass frame of her office door. Others sightings are reported; people gather
in expectation of visions and portents. The City of Angels lives up to its name. [more]
How to Feed the Monster.
Two years ago, Brad Vice's debut short story collection was pulled after plagarism charges. Now the collection has been published. Barrett Hathcock wants to know if the charges were legit, if the book is worth reading, and what it all means.
[more]
Review: Amulet by Roberto Bolaño.
Amulet, one of Bolaño's shorter novels (the lengthy ones will be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, beginning with The Savage Detectives later
this year), is the best of the four excellent Bolaño books published in English thus far (all by New Directions)-- Bolaño's voice is more distinct here,
more undeniably and specifically Bolaño. Whether this is due to my having read four of his books in a short period of time, and finally "hearing"
Bolaño's voice, or because translator Chris Andrews is becoming more and more comfortable with Bolaño's prose (and hearing the author's voice in a
different way), or because it's just a wonderful book I can't say. But, as with any great work of literature, Amulet continues to haunt, puzzle, and
nag at me. [more]
Stephen Schenkenberg on the audio edition of William Gass's The Tunnel
(From the Winter '07 Edition)
When William H. Gass's 650-page novel The Tunnel was finally published in 1995, following nearly three decades of labor by the critically
esteemed author and essayist, it was called a lot of things. Two critics used the word "monster," and they weren't simply referring to the abhorrent
narrator, history professor and Nazi specialist William Frederick Kohler, who most certainly fits the bill; those critics were describing the book itself.
While "Bookworm" host Michael Silverblatt deemed The Tunnel "the most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my
lifetime"--a claim he renewed last year--James Wolcott scored the novel's long-awaited landing a "bellyflop." For Steven Moore, writing in The Review
of Contemporary Fiction, the work was "a stupendous achievement and obviously one of the greatest novels of the century." For James Bowman: "a load
of crap." In The New York Times Book Review, Robert Kelly called The Tunnel an "infuriating and offensive masterpiece," ending his
2,600-word review by essentially--and perhaps bravely--throwing up his hands: "It will be years before we know what to make of it."
For anyone who still cares about this book, it's been a great year. Dalkey Archive Press, which has published The Tunnel since 1999, has
given us two valuable offerings: last spring, Dalkey's low-profile journal CONTEXT published a two-page document called "Designing The Tunnel,"
excerpts from Gass's 12-point instructions to the book's designer about layout, type, and the overall visual goals as they related to the book's themes;
and a month later, the publisher released an unabridged audio book of the novel, recorded by the 83-year-old author last year near his home in St. Louis.
One is two pages; the other, 45 hours. Both provide compelling ways to re-experience this disagreeable and stunning novel.
[more]
From the Winter '07 Edition:
Brien Michael on Lisa Takeuchi Cullen's Remember Me
What seems to be unsettling to everyone involved, including Cullen, is the tension between encomium and economics: how do you honor the dead while turning a profit? As Valerie Wage goes on to say in her presentation, "Dangit, we need to get out of the box and save families. Take that step. Make that difference. Bring their pet in and let it sit on her chest. Who's going to remember the casket she was buried in?" Quite right. With Grandma's golden retriever sitting on her chest, no one will probably remember anything else.
It is difficult to overlook the absurdity of the industry's imperative to recreate the intimate details and mazy narrative of someone's life with doilies and baby powder and seventy-five pound canines, arrayed like props, warm and fuzzy memento mori. The staging of grief is also a bit obscene, and it seems that Wage's intent to save the family is to coerce their emotional catharsis. How very Greek. And in keeping with the conventions of classical tragedy, the death occurs offstage, but the dramatic consequences ensue onstage: the pulling of hair, the gnashing of teeth, and the renting of garments. Cullen recognizes that, even though they are the audience of Wage's presentation, funeral directors might be reluctant to adopt this tactic enthusiastically. It's not that creating a personal touch is ineffective, but rather it is too effective. Dealing so creatively with death day in and day out takes a personal toll on the funeral directors. Cullen is savvy in sensing that not only do funeral directors have businesses to run, they also have their sanity to safeguard. [more]
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Books by Quarterly Conversation Contributors
The Interloper
Antoine Wilson
Handsel Books / Other Press, 2007
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Best American Fantasy
Series Editor Matthew Cheney
Prime Books, 2007
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Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader
Anne Fernald
Palgrave MacMillan, 2006
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Anxious Pleasures
Lance Olsen
Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007
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Highly Irregular Stories
Richard Grayson
Dumbo Books, 2006
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A Field Guide to the North American Family
Garth Rish Hallberg
Mark Batty Publisher, 2007
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Crawl Space
Edie Meidav
Picador, 2005
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The Devil is a Gentleman
J.C. Hallman
Random House, 2006
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