Sand sculpture inspired by Dante’s Inferno, Jesolo, Italy, 2009. All recent English-language versions of Dante’s Inferno—of which there are enough to fill a fair-sized ditch in Malebolge—come equipped with notes explaining Dante’s references to transgressors such as Farinata degli Uberti or Archbishop Ruggieri or Vanni Fucci or Michael Scot, this last being an enterprising Scottish […]
This is not a book I would normally read; I rarely read mysteries, and the title, Gone Girl, is irritating on its face. I bought it anyway because two friends recommended it with enormous enthusiasm, and because I was curious about its enormous popularity: the millions of copies sold, the impending movie by David Fincher and Reese Witherspoon, the glowing reviews. I found it as irritating as imagined, populated by snarky-cute, pop-culturally twisted voices coming out of characters who seem constructed entirely of “referents” and “signifiers,” and who say things like “Suck it, snobdouche!” The only reason I kept reading
Bless an author with a long enough career, and even the most outcast elements can get a second chance. In Thomas Pynchon’s encyclopedic, pull-out-the-stops first novel, V. (1963), the Upper West Side merits only a withering dismissal:
At the beginning of Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie, the first-person narrator, BP, takes testosterone. It’s not the first time BP has self-administered the clear gel, a fifty-milligram dose squeezed from a small silver packet and absorbed instantly into the skin, but now, fresh grief crystallizes the project: It’s the evening s/he learns a dear friend, GD, is dead. “I’m not taking testosterone to change myself into a man or as a physical strategy of transsexualism,” Preciado writes. “I take it to foil what society wanted to make of me, so that I can write, fuck, feel a form of pleasure
A colonel in Napoleon’s army is severely wounded during a daring act of valor at the Battle of Eylau, then trampled by cavalry seeking to rescue him. Given up for dead, the “old greatcoat” is tossed in a mass grave. Many years later, having clawed his way out of the earth and been nursed back to health abroad, he returns to Paris, appearing at a lawyer’s office to attempt to reclaim his name, his fortune, and his family. But there is no place for the formerly dead in the France of the Restoration. Colonel Chabert’s would-be widow has liquidated his
“The gates of hell aren’t somewhere far beneath us. They’re right here on earth.” This is the uncompromising perspective of Ma Jian’s hallucinatory new novel, The Dark Road the bleak tone will come as no surprise to those familiar with his earlier work. The word rebel is bandied around fairly lightly in literary circles, but Ma qualifies. Unlike novelists such as Mo Yan or Su Tong, who keep on the right side of the domestic censor through inference, vagueness, and strategic silences, Ma has been in open confrontation with the Chinese establishment since well before the suppression of his first
You can take the girl out of prison, but you can’t take prison out of the girl. Anne, the nineteen-year-old narrator of Albertine Sarrazin’s Astragal—published in France in 1965 and in the US in 1967, and now reissued by New Directions—has liberated herself from a “prison school” by jumping off a thirty-foot wall. Landing, she breaks her left ankle, but this injury may be less grievous than the lingering effects of her incarceration. She has a disturbing awareness that even now, on the outside, she is a creature of the institution: “Prison still surrounded me: I found it in my
From the outset, it’s been clear that Claire Messud has all the necessary equipment—a fertile imagination, a grown-up sensibility, and writerly ambition in spades—to write very good fiction, perhaps even a novel that defined our times. One could detect in her prose the influence of many writers—Henry James and Elizabeth Bowen are just two that come to mind—without being able to pin her to a particular school or manner. She seemed, that is, very much her own person, trying out various devices as they suited her. If anything stood in her way, it was the fact that her imagination and
In an epigraph at the beginning of his new novel, All That Is, James Salter announces that he now realizes everything is a dream, the only reality is that which is preserved in writing. If this is true, Salter—the writer if not the man—has a lot to answer for. I have just spent the past few weeks reading a number of his books, and it seems to me that if anything is a dream, it is the motive force behind the work of this highly acclaimed writer who, for more than fifty years, has been producing novels and stories whose
Since its publication in 2008, Fiona Maazel’s first novel, Last Last Chance, has won a small and cultlike following, myself included. I love the book because it is constantly surprising—blackly funny but permeated by great sadness, like the fiction of Barry Hannah or Donald Antrim—besides which every sentence in it shines like gold. The story of an über-rich drug addict and her massively dysfunctional family (they smoke crack, worship Norse gods, release an apocalyptic super-plague), Last Last Chance is a smarter and bleaker book than it gets credit for, but it’s still, at bottom, a comedy: Each reader can decide
Catholic women show their bangles at a Christmas celebration in Multan, December 23, 2002. On March 2, 2011, Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s Catholic minister of minority affairs, was murdered—his car sprayed with bullets as he left his mother’s house in Islamabad. Bhatti had been the target of many previous threats and was, by his own account, […]
When Nell Freudenberger debuted in the pages of the New Yorker in the summer of 2001, the New York literary community responded less to the short story she’d managed to write so much more adeptly than her “Début Fiction” comrades of that year than to the accompanying author photograph, a simple but misguided portrait of a twenty-six-year-old girl staring doe-eyed up at a camera from a curiously vast and purple bed. The reaction was summed up in Curtis Sittenfeld’s 2003 essay for Salon, which offered the riveting thesis that she was simply “too young, too pretty, too successful” and took
Abdellah Taïa writes short sentences, often without verbs. Single words sometimes. There is light and space in his prose. And despair. At times, he uses the ellipsis suggestively . . . bringing out the apertures within and between words and thoughts, eliciting the unbridgeable gap between individuals. That is where desire seems to lie, and where longing—and melancholia—is to be found in his writing.
When Anne Carson was a child, she read Lives of the Saints and adored it so much she tried to eat its pages. The Canadian classicist and poet has never lost this desire to merge with the text; if anything, she’s created forms that allow her to eat as many pages as she possibly can. In her translations and recastings of the classics, she enters the books she loves, tilts and deranges them and makes them her own. Nor has she lost her appetite for the physicality, the thingness, of a book. She eulogized her brother, Michael, in Nox (2010)—a
The title of Jamaica Kincaid’s See Now Then is one variation on the modus operandi of any novelist who takes up the passage of familial time as subject matter. (À la recherche du temps perdu could be translated as See Then Now.) The intensity of the imperative title is crucial (think of Francisco Goldman’s wrenching Say Her Name, memorializing his young wife, killed in a swimming accident) but also a little misleading, because this is not a novel that wants to illuminate the past for its own sake. Indeed, quite the opposite: In See Now Then memories appear and reappear
Amity Gaige’s Schroder, her third novel, is a daring book. It tells a clean, suspenseful, economical story that is also a clever act of social commentary. It asks us to empathize with one of the most benighted figures in today’s marital hierarchy: the sketchy divorced dad, in this case the title character, who is at best an “erratic” father, a laid-off at-home parent unwilling to fret about things like BPA and the dangers of Mountain Dew, and more than willing to pick up a dead fox with his young daughter and study it. On the verge of divorce, this father
By now, we know the George Saunders tool kit: his favored verbs, such as to “wonk.” His stylistic tics, such as “such as.” The arbitrarily capitalized phrases, copyrighted and trademarked: I CAN SPEAK! TM And we know the concerns those nouns and verbs betray: the encroachment of advertising into our emotional lives; the juxtaposition of the casual and the colloquial with the profound; the enthusiasm and earnest sincerity with which we lie to ourselves and others. In earlier collections like CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) and Pastoralia (2000), Saunders indulged a fascination with melancholy ghosts, death-filled theme parks, and near-future
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In his first book, Pavane (1981), David Trinidad included a poem titled “The Peasant Girl,” derived from Charles Perrault’s fairy tale “Diamonds and Toads.” The poet presents an unwanted girl who stoically keeps house for her stepmother until the day she is visited by a hideous crone who begs for a drink of well water; the girl complies, and, for a reward, the crone says, “Whenever you speak, / beautiful flowers and priceless gems shall flow / into the world with your words.” The girl rushes home, anxious to tell
The Kim Jong Il that we meet in Adam Johnson’s second novel, set in North Korea, is no cartoon villain, no Team America marionette. He’s a three-dimensional character—a hairsprayed, jumpsuited, hopping-mad monomaniac, sure, but a man in whom we can recognize some of our own jealousies and desires. And although he is offstage more often than not in The Orphan Master’s Son, Dear Leader, as he’s usually referred to, is omnipresent in every conversation, every moment of intimacy, every sorrow that takes place somewhere in this fictional DPRK. He’s the glue holding together not just an entire totalitarian nation, but
