Jean Echenoz’s twelfth book, his second historical novel, throws into relief the difficult and remarkable life of Emil Zátopek, a Czech long-distance runner. The story might be merely inspirational if Echenoz did not tell it so truthfully: Though Zátopek is regarded as one of the greatest runners of the twentieth century, his famously brutal training techniques and graceless form suggested an expertise almost wrenched from his body: “He knows he can rely on himself and on his love of pain,” Echenoz writes.
- print • Dec/Jan 2010
- print • Dec/Jan 2010
Published in 1978, The Stories of John Cheever was a luminous treasure at the end of gravity’s rainbow. In that retrospective collection, Cheever’s fiction faced backward against the ranks of Pynchon, Barth, Gaddis, and Gass to sum up a rapidly vanishing era of smart manners and discreet affluence, but the hulking volume also heralded a new moment for the American short story. (The book sold some half a million copies, a record for short fiction.) Even if the New Yorker formula Cheever had perfected had become a bit tweedy, his sturdy old realism had life in it yet.
- print • Dec/Jan 2010
Princeton Architectural Press is about to release a book on Frida Kahlo that features a cache of purportedly rediscovered paintings, journals, and trinket-laced archival materials, which experts are denouncing as fake. The publication looks to do little for the reputation and life story of the complicated Mexican artist except to further cheapen them. But as a venture into the territory where fiction stalks fact, it handily illustrates the romanticized notions of history’s celebrities that get cast back over time.
- print • Dec/Jan 2010
When Harry Tichborne, at the outset of Laird Hunt’s elegant novel Ray of the Star, crosses the Atlantic for an extended stay in an unnamed city, his journey seems an appropriate migration. In his pairing of somber themes and fanciful ambience, Hunt shares little with his American contemporaries and displays a Continental sensibility that recalls the fabulism of Cees Nooteboom (The Following Story) and the antic charms of Éric Chevillard (On the Ceiling). Written as a series of single-sentence chapters, Hunt’s wave-upon-wave piling of clauses also brings to mind the style of José Saramago. Like these writers, Hunt works in
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2009
Hilary Mantel is the finest underappreciated writer working in Britain. While her better-known contemporaries (Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan—make your own list) garner fame and fortune, she quietly produces one excellent novel after another. Each is different: They range from a portrait of a sheltered twentieth-century woman misreading a Muslim culture (Eight Months on Ghazzah Street [1988]) to a hilariously dark send- up of the psychic profession in all its guises (Beyond Black [2005]) to the best novel I have ever read about the French Revolution (A Place of Greater Safety [1992]). Yet they all contain the
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2009
Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s seventh novel, follows so quickly on the heels of his sixth, the massive Against the Day (2006), that the teams of specialists who go over the fuselage of every Pynchon text as if it were a spy plane forced down by mechanical difficulties, identifying the probable origin and function of each part, writing up the results in Pynchon Notes or on the Internet, must be gnashing their teeth with weariness. The red telephone again? Aw, sheesh. If only there were some way to persuade them not to worry! Inherent Vice is by far the least puzzling
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2006
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2006
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2006
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2006
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2006
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2006
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2006
Perhaps the chief draw of any postapocalyptic spectacle is the vast opportunity for plunder; Chris Adrian’s medical millenarianism, however, envisions a band of survivors rather indisposed to such distraction. The Children’s Hospital imagines a genre-exploding eschaton where the chief residual vice is less indulgence than blinkered intensity: Its legatees are doctors, and come hell or high water—or, in this case, both—nothing will delay their rounds. Adrian’s epic opens with a flood that drowns the planet under seven miles of water, and the only postdiluvial buoy is a floating pediatric hospital with its thousand-odd inhabitants.
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2006
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2006
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2006
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2006
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2006
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2006
- print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2006