The Sword Cabinet
by
Robert
Edric
All
Territories
|
The Kite family, onetime mythical daredevils and
high artists of the trapeze, have fallen to earth in post-War England,
and their collective memory has devolved upon a hustler and exhausted illusionist
named Mitchell. He is on a search to recover his mother's life and to escape
the shambles he's made of a seaside club fallen so low that the only crowd
it can muster for a beauty pageant is the crowd of those seeking his blood.
Moving across multiple timelines, Robert Edric traces the history of the
Kite family and of a murder investigation spiralling around Morgan, the
last of the great escapalogists who dooms himself in his wildest feat,
one too dangerous even for Houdini: freezing himself alive. Whatever threadbare
gains Mitchell makes from his questioning, he at least gathers the strength
for his own final performance. Unfortunately, his story pales so against
that of the larger characters, that by the end the reader may not much
care about his fate. Paul McRandle  |
|
It's almost too easy to claim that Kiran Desai's
debut novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, is the embodiment
of Italo Calvino's values of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility,
and multiplicity. But it needs to be said, for this is no earnest
first novel, no disguised memoir: her social satire is brief, delightful
in its humor, precise in its caricatures, and generously encompasses an
entire Indian village--including the wildlife. The book concerns the story
of young Sampath Chawla, a layabout who, in proper heroic form, garners
fame by rising above society, in this case by climbing into a tree. From
there Sampath becomes a focus for villagers willing to believe he holds
spiritual insight into their lives when in fact he simply draws on time
spent as a postman reading their mail. Soon enough the whole world comes
spinning in around this timid boy who wishes for nothing more than escape.
Speaking of Calvino's literary values, there is perhaps also a slight tipping
of the hat to his Baron in the Trees; in any case, I am sure he
would have well enjoyed Ms. Desai's crafty, sensuous novel. Paul McRandle |
Hullabaloo
in
the
Guava
Orchard
by
Kiran
Desai
Americas,
Africa
&
Asia
Europe
|
|
Memories of
My Father
Watching TV
by
Curtis
White
Americas,
Africa
&
Asia
Europe
|
With such a domestic title
reeking of the rec room, it's easy to see how one father/reviewer at Amazon
felt himself duped by Curtis White's recent fevered novel. Yet how appropriate
that this book about killing fathers should be given unknowingly by a daughter
to her dear dad. For what sounds like a gentle and nostalgic baby-boomer
memoir reveals itself to be a nasty and funny or funny and nasty mix of
TV room battles, rotoscope frenzies, and myth. The novel arrives as a series
of incarnations: Highway Patrol, Sea Hunt, Combat,
Have
Gun Will Travel, TV shows so little worth repeating that by their absence
they've become something potent in White's memory. Most of these episodes
take place somewhere between the living room, the stage set, and the fictional
locale, the father less their star than their scapegoat. His humiliations
are endless--from confessing on a quiz show that he's best described as
a turd in a hat to playing a German bridge used by Nazis and blown sky-high
by his son. Most other times he lies comatose on the couch, only rousing
himself if his children dare to interrupt his show. But as Dad sinks in
his stupor, kids screw on the sofa, Maverick is born as a foetus in a boot,
and a huge, singing worm is squeezed from Ben Cartwright's head. It's obvious
that White's models include Kafka and Barthelme, but he avoids sounding
merely derivative. While he can be sneeringly arch, through much of Memories
White homesteads television's imaginative landscape with all the zeal of
a man opening up a new frontier. In the process, he makes other writers
on the subject sound like mere armchair travellers. Paul McRandle |
| Pulling out the seventies'
titles of Raymond Federman is almost like reviewing old Beefheart albums--it's
not as if they haven't been in print over the years, but they haven't been
given credit for the amazing (and funny) things they are. Federman is a
French-born writer of Jewish descent who's mother and father hid him in
a closet when the Nazis came to take them and his two sisters away. Not
a lot there to build a comic career. He left France after the war, moved
to the U.S. and dragged himself through a series of cities and mishaps
that have, after being thoroughly remixed, distorted, retold, contradicted,
and denied, become a good part of these novels. Double or Nothing,
the earlier of the two, contains the triply-nested narratives of an almost
non-existent "stubborn and determined middle aged man" telling the story
of a paranoid author who plans to lock himself in a room for a year with
only noodles to live on so he can write the story of a shy, young frenchman
just arrived in New York after the war. The book looks harder to read than
it is--lines of text run backwards and forwards, build up in pyramids and
cut with jagged sawteeth. Almost every page is built according to a different
design, but despite the dadaist randomness, if you read along word by word
any difficulties are overcome by the energy of his prose. After all, what
you're reading are endless (but somehow funny, over and over) lists and
worryings of what the paranoid writer can afford for his year locked away:
precisely how many boxes of noodles, whether tomato sauce once a week for
flavour might bust the bank, how he's going to store his 104 rolls of t.p.
so he can count the horses on his wallpaper, and always interrupting these
pointless turns of frenetic ordering with the hapless encounters of the
young French guy fixated by the crotch of a woman on the subway, screwing
his friend's mother, and trying not to sound pathetic about his awful past.
What’s not to like? Paul McRandle |
Double
or
Nothing
by
Raymond
Federman
Americas,
Africa
&
Asia
Europe
|
Take
It or Leave It
by
Raymond
Federman
Americas,
Africa
&
Asia
Europe
|
Take It or Leave
It eases the typographical turmoil of Double or Nothing, but
torments his narrators--this time an anonymous someone is standing in front
of an unruly audience telling the story told to him by a young French guy
("Frenchy"), now somewhat older, making his way out of his military barracks
in North Carolina to his planned great American adventure. He wants to
hitch across the country to meet up with a ship in San Francisco that'll
take him off to the Korean War, but first he's got to get his check from
Vermont. Like Double or Nothing, the stories here fall back on themselves
to be reworked and criticized by the crowd. A pious voice asks why Frenchy
didn't feel exploited as a foreigner by the "structures of Capitalism":
"Do I understand correctly? UNBELIEVABLE!
You guys are really a bunch of perverts! The stuff you can come up with!
And now I'm asked if I understand THE QUESTION? ... Yes his story you find
it amusing. You think that perhaps it is tellable recitable since you stand
there listening to it with gaping mouths. And why not? Interesting even
(even a bit obscene). Don't you think so? Nonetheless you guys would have
liked to have had his experiences his adventures and his avatars. His bitchy
existence! N'est-ce pas? ... But for you guys there is always a solution
as it was once suggested: You simply contrive a little kingdom in the midst
of the universal muck and then shit on it."
Sending up Kerouac and drawing on his love
of Beckett, Federman can't help but get caught up in his machinations,
cancelling his story as he goes. He knows full well that "in fact, however,
there can always be more words." Paul McRandle
|
| It's as if all the pleasures
that should have saturated the FC2 Reader were drained off by its
co-editor Ronald Sukenick into his, to use a silly word, delightful new
novel, Mosaic Man. From the title on, Sukenick's punning feverishly
upon the bible, (his chapters: Genes, Ex/ode, Umbilicus, Numbers, Autonomy,
Profits), to devise his own "wholly book." The story, such as it is, concentrates
around Ron the author and various anagrammatic spin-off identities: Ronda,
Rona, ROM, RAM, Aron, covering in a variety of modes
from dream narrative to autobiographical confession his/their search for
the Golden Calf. It begins with a comic overture shimmering with the novel's
themes: Genetics and the Word, Jewishness and anti-Semitism. He plays with
an old tape recording of his family, transcribing it complete with blank
space for dropouts, then moves into feverish childhood vision as Ronnie
and Captain Midnight escape New York in a flying wing to bomb Nazis. He
returns to earth as a callow young man making a go at bohemian Paris in
the fifties, confessing more than we likely want to hear about his mistreatment
of women. He's a pig, but a sorely self-aware pig. As if in penance (though
many years later), Ron travels to Jerusalem only to find himself caught
up in more sinister conspiracies. A Texan millennialist hopes to blow up
the Dome of the Rock and rebuild the Third Temple, mysterious others seek
the Golden Calf, and the Golem lurks in the shadows. But Sukenick is too
crafty to trap himself in either thriller pulp or the literature of consolation.
What he does come up with as a credo, is more of a critique, "You thought
it was a religion? What makes you think it's a religion? Being Jewish is
an art . . . You got to have talent." I can't speak for being Jewish, but
talent? Sukenick's blessed. Paul McRandle. |
Mosaic
Man
by
Ronald
Sukenick
Americas,
Africa
&
Asia
Europe
|
Sorry
Meniscus
by
Iain
Sinclair
|
To Americans, London's
Millennium Dome is more likely to recall Logan's Run or a football
stadium than St. Paul's Cathedral. It's equally unlikely that many outside
of Britain will take much interest in a critique of it. Iain Sinclair's
little tract will only earn their attention when it comes closest to a
rant, satisfying ill-spirited if universal urges to see great plans collapse
and rich men shown for fools. In this Sinclair doesn't spare himself; his
attacks on "the Teflon Hedgehog" are unremitting. There's no pretence of
fair-mindedness here, and the photographs of this "poached egg sunset,"
"this skin with no pudding," give little reason for one. Engulfing 200
million pounds of lottery money and fouling traffic, the dome in return
provides "all the excitement of a slightly dirty circus tent." Does it
matter that others will enjoy the tent once filled? Not to Sinclair, yet
he never attacks the potential audience for bad taste. In fact, he has
the polling to show that most of Britain sees it for the waste it is. He
attacks those who profit from it by abusing the public's good will. A slight
book, Sinclair nonetheless shows how much local history and pragmatic utility
the powerful are happy to sacrifice in the name of entertainment. As he
puts it, "Give us the bread and we'll give you the circuses." Paul McRandle
All
Territories
|
|
