[The Roof Rat Review.]
Donald Keene. World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Premodern Era - 1600-1867 (A History of Japanese Literature - Volume 2). Columbia University Press, 1999 (World Within Walls, 1976). Literary history through a reflecting telescope: genres cohere and then hollow out, what moves are possible when.
The Warm South
The Roof Rat Review
- Christine Wunnicke. Der Fuchs und Dr. Shimamura. Berenberg, Heinrich von, 2015. The best German book about fox spirits in Shimane Prefecture that I can imagine.
- Walter Kempowski, Mario Rubino (trans). Alles umsonst. Verlag Albrecht Knaus (Random House Verlagsgr.), 2007 (2006). It starts like Alice Munro and ends like Yiyun Li's The Vagrants. The rock-hard texture of 1945 is worked right through.
- Herman Melville, John Bryant (introduction, commentary). Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. Penguin Classics, 1996 (Typee, 1846). So much wild implausibility next to passages just strange enough to have the ring of reality; it's a minor agony to guess how much of it really happened.
- Gerald Murnane. The Plains. New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2003 (1982). The, well, flatness comes off just as intended, but I'm not sure I'm credulous enough for a society in which everybody is a different version of Wallace Stevens.
- Guadalupe Nettel, J.T. Lichtenstein (trans). The Body Where I Was Born. Seven Stories Press, 2015 (El cuerpo en que nací, 2011). I didn't know how to read it as fiction rather than memoir, nor what that reading would mean.
- Virgil, Janet Lembke (trans). Virgil's Georgics. Yale University Press, 2006 (Georgica, -29). Advice for all seasons, and very rich, even if his wasn't a century when you would actually expect to meet a god on a farm.
- Alex Danchev. Cezanne: A Life. Pantheon, 2012. It's often loose and can feel like a collection of anecdotes, but then there's something appropriate about letting incidents hang free as disconnected brushstrokes rather than plaster it all with narrative contour.
- Dimitris Lyacos. The First Death. Shoestring Press, 2005 (Ο πρώτος θάνατος, 1996). Harder to hook into than Z213: Exit; when your hero starts out dead there's less plain world under the mythopoeia. The difference between poetry and prose, at least in translation. I'm impressed even so.
- Dimitris Lyacos, Shorsha Sullivan (trans). Z213: EXIT. Shoestring Press, 2010 (Ζ213: ΕΞΟΔΟΣ, 2010). Late Beckett is the obvious reference point; incredibly, I think it survives the comparison. The translation reads very well, but note this narrative of ambiguous exile and pursuit could also be titled Exodus.
- Valeria Luiselli. Lost Children Archive. Knopf Publishing Group, 2019. Intelligent, and only intelligent. The writer's transition to a New York author seems complete, and the children characters (though it must have been the last thing intended) are baldly used.
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