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By Eric Markowsky, on May 14th, 2013  Author: Antonio Tabucchi, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks
2013, Archipelago Books
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
The good people at Archipelago Books are out with a new Antonio Tabucchi title in English this spring, and while I can’t gush about it the way I did about The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico, I think you might still find The Woman of Porto Pim worth your while.
The title short story is a classic, old-fashioned tale of love, betrayal, and murder set in a small whaling village. The voice of the narrator, an aged tavern singer, is full of longing and mystery. It’s one of the finest short stories I’ve read anywhere in a long time.
The book, on the other hand, is something more curious. It’s a tourist’s love letter to the Azores, a set of remote Atlantic islands considered an autonomous region of Portugal. Fueled by a hybrid of research, personal experience, and imagination, The Woman of Porto Pim offers a brief overview on the whaling regulations governing the islands, a first-person account of a whale hunt, and a few observations on human beings from the point of view of the hunted whales. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on March 22nd, 2013  Author: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
2013, Penguin Books
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
5 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Back in 2010, I ended my review of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by saying I expected to start seeing more translations of her work in English “very soon.” So I was pretty excited this past January when I first read about the release of There Once Was a Woman Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories. This is what I’d been waiting for.
Things started out well enough. Translator Anna Summers’s brief introduction reminded me of everything I’d loved about Scary Fairy Tales and set the stage for Petrushevskaya’s particular brand of Love Stories, constrained and distorted by the cramped spaces of communal Soviet living. The first story, “A Murky Fate,” packed so much embarrassment and desperation into just four pages that I felt a little bad about reading it while sitting next to someone on the bus.
As I read further into the collection, though, I started feeling a little disappointed. While these stories are compact and dark, just like I expected, and while there are definitely some stand outs, like “A Murky Fate,” “Two Deities,” and “Hallelujah, Family!”, there’s also a lot of repetition here, a lot of people being unhappy in the same ways and turning to the same outlets with the same results. No one piece struck me as a total let down, but as a collection, Love Stories lacks the endless inventiveness that made Scary Fairy Tales so memorable. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on February 26th, 2013  Author: Amity Gaige
2013, Twelve Books
Filed under: Literary
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
5 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
I have some very mixed feelings about Amity Gaige’s new novel Schroder. It tells the story of a father kidnapping his own daughter in the midst of a contentious custody battle, but the plot is far from what’s most noteworthy about this strange epistolary novel.
Erik Schroder is a fascinating, at times bewildering narrator. After immigrating to the U.S. from East Germany, he decides to take on a new American identity, Eric Kennedy, invents a new history for himself, and sets out, over the course of his life, to sever every tie with his past. He only brings it up here in this confession-cum-apology in an attempt to explain what he’s done and who he really is to his ex-wife, Laura.
Justifying his life of deception is the perfect challenge for a divergent imagination like Schroder’s. He’s at his most captivating when explaining how he came to love his own lies and their fruits, his beautiful American family. By turns charming, convincing, challenging, pleading, aggressive, and disturbing, his voice carries an emotional range that almost carries the novel all by itself.
But not quite.
…
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By Eric Markowsky, on February 15th, 2013  Author: Jehanne Dubrow
2012, Triquarterly Books
Filed Under: Poetry
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
Just after the Soviet Union collapsed, my family hosted a member of an exchange group visiting our small New Hampshire town from the nascent Russian Federation. His name was Vladimir. I don’t remember anything about him except that he was good at darts and he loved grocery shopping. We must have taken him to Shop’n’Save every other day to pick out a new variety of juice.
I hadn’t thought about Vladimir in years, and then I came across these lines in Jehanne Dubrow’s Red Army Red, from the poem “Bag ‘N Save”:
… We walk the aisles
of twenty kinds of paper towels, the display
of Reynolds plastic wrap, the perfect smiles
that gleam from every tube of crest. We’re lost.
Dubrow’s sonnet evokes an indulgent sense of awe I now recognize in my memories of Vladimir and his friends, overwhelmed by possibilities yet reveling in being overwhelmed, like someone finding satisfaction even in a stomach ache after a long anticipated meal. I was just a little kid when he visited, but Dubrow’s poem helped flesh out a character I could only vaguely recall.
For me, this was the most powerful aspect of Red Army Red, giving a shape, an expression, in some cases even a whole gangly adolescent body, to a not so distant chapter in history. If you have any memories of the last days of the Cold War and what that meant, no matter how young you might have been then–or if your family never hosted a shopping addict from Russia–you’ll find powerful echoes in Dubrow’s personal history in verse that help make history personal. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on February 5th, 2013 This Calvino-esque collection is a C4 Great Read.
 Author: Antonio Tabucchi, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks
2013, Archipelago Books
Filed under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
I’d never heard of Antonio Tabucchi before I tore open the wrapping on a copy of The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico this past Christmas. Turns out, he was one of the most celebrated Italian authors of the modern era until his death just this past year. His name stands along side the likes of Primo Levi and Italo Calvino, and for good reason.
The stories in Flying Creatures more than live up to comparison with the works of any other postmodernist masters. Tabucchi renders narratives as light as air in rich, thoughtful prose. These pieces are fabulist, historical, experimental, philosophical.
But rather than laboring the point any further myself, let me share how Tabucchi characterizes the tales collected here (as translated by Tim Park) in his brief introduction to Flying Creatures:
I would have liked to call them Extravaganzas, not so much for their style, as because many of them seem to wander about in a strange outside that has no inside, like drifting splinters, survivors of some whole that never was. Alien to any orbit, I have the impression they navigate in familiar spaces whose geometry nevertheless remains a mystery; let’s say domestic thickets: the interstitial zones of our daily having-to-be, or bumps on the surface of existence.
If that’s enough to make you want to run off and read these stories, I won’t blame you if you stop reading this review right here. If you still need more convincing, then let me tell you about “The Passion of Dom Pedro.” …
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By Eric Markowsky, on January 29th, 2013  Author: Laura van den Berg
2012, Origami Zoo Press
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories, Short-Run
Find it on Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
If I’m not careful, my review of Laura van den Berg’s recent collection of short shorts might end up being longer than the book itself. It’s not that I’m normally long-winded. It’s just that the whole thing is only thirty six pages long, and there’s a lot of good stuff in There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights. I’m tempted to summarize each of these little narrative gems–only one of its nine stories is longer than four pages–but by the time I finished that, you might as well have just read the book.
And you should read the book. Van den Berg’s very short stories are self-contained parables of modern life and love gone stale and the ways people sometimes try to rescue themselves from themselves. Her characters’s efforts run the gamut of realism and fantasy, from a struggling couple who rents a house by a lake for a summer to a family who adopt a couple of cannibals to help out with childcare. Whatever the mode, these stories are astutely observed and precisely composed portraits of life’s disappointments, large and small. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on December 14th, 2012 [As each year comes to a close, we ask our contributors to give us their favorite books from the past 12 months and beyond. You can follow the entries through the rest of the year here, and check out the picks from 2009, 2010, and 2011 while you're at it.]
2012 involved a lot of moving around for me, which meant I had a chance to do a lot of reading on buses, trains, and planes, but also that I lost track of what I’d read pretty easily. Looking back at my year in books turned out to be a great pleasure for me, a scavenger hunt through my memories looking for prizes I knew I’d like because I’d hidden them there myself. So here it is, my Best Books of 2012, in categories more personal than just simply current.
 Best new book: This is How You Lose Her, by Junot Diaz
Hands down the best new book I read this year. In my review, I tried to respond to some of the critics who seemed intent on pointing out two things: (1) this isn’t Diaz’s anticipated sci-fi apocalypse novel, and (2) some of these stories have been around for a while. To them, I say: (1) shut up, and (2) who cares? These are great stories, some are new, and all of them are being collected for the first time. All nine story endings are beautiful, so give each one the attention it deserves. Start at the beginning, and don’t spare a sentence just because you might have seen it once before already.
 Best debut: A Partial History of Lost Causes, by Jennifer DuBois
I’m a sucker for books about modern Russian history (Revolution on), and if you can squeeze in some chess and a little desperation, even better. If that’s not your idea of a good time, there are still plenty of reasons to read DuBois’s debut novel. The plot has its hiccups, but the writing is sharp, thoughtful, and charged, and the characters are great, even the minor ones who don’t seem all that important at first–maybe especially the minor ones who don’t seem all that important at first. Everyone in this book has something to say worth hearing, but only some of them get the chance to say it. The least we can do is try to listen. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on November 1st, 2012  Author: Kevin Powers
2012, Little, Brown and Company
Filed Under: Literary
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
In our August podcast, we talked about negative book reviews, when it’s worth writing one or why readers might be interested in reading one. I’ve been thinking about that conversation a lot since I finished Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds, because while it isn’t a bad book, it isn’t very good either. It’s thoughtful and lyrical and ambitious and finally unfulfilling.
You wouldn’t know it from the accolades it’s getting: blurbs from Colm Tóibín and Ann Patchett, a gushing review in the New York Times, and, most recently, a nomination for the National Book Award. As a war novel, it’s been compared to The Things They Carried and All Quiet on the Western Front.
Comparisons like these make me worry that some reviewers aren’t honestly responding to the novel in front of them; instead, they’re writing about the novel they want to see come out of our war in Iraq, something modern and important to stand beside the classics. For now, I’ll try to set aside my suspicions, which may be unfair, to focus on The Yellow Birds itself, which just doesn’t measure up to a lot of the praise it’s receiving elsewhere.
…
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By Eric Markowsky, on October 22nd, 2012  Author: Jonathan Lethem
2011, Doubleday
Filed Under: Literary, Nonfiction, Memoir, Short Stories, Sci-Fi
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
In case you missed it last year, Jonathan Lethem’s essay collection, The Ecstasy of Influence, is out in paperback this month. It’s easy to recommend for any fan of Lethem’s work, offering a broad look at his development as a writer and some of his most cherished influences.
But it’s easy to recommend for a few different kinds of readers as well. There’s some interesting music writing in here about Bob Dylan and Rick James, essays about comic books and “Wall Art,” not to mention the Harper’s essay that lends its name to the collection, a surprising meditation on plagarism, copyright, reuse, and creativity. There’s also–and being a fan of Lethem’s fiction, I had not anticipated this–a set of pretty funny stories all featuring Drew Barrymore.
So there’re a lot of reasons you might decide to give this little collection a try, while not forgetting its self-referential structure and its circular conception of itself. Reading the whole thing straight through could be a worthwhile project for the dedicated enthusiast, but cherry picking the bits you find most intriguing is fine too, and probably equally in keeping with the book’s madcap sensibility.
At the very least, you should check out the Harper’s essay, available here or in the heart of this strange survey of the preoccupations of a writer named Jonathan Lethem.
Similar reads: The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem, Advertisements for Myself by Norman Mailer, and The Gift by Lewis Hyde.
By Eric Markowsky, on September 27th, 2012 Author: Junot Diaz
Riverhead Books, 2012
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
Amidst the praise for Junot Diaz’s new story collection, This is How You Lose Her, some critics are striking the same disappointed notes. The tune goes like this: These stories are good, but they’re no Oscar Wao. When is Monstro coming out? The LA Review of Books calls this collection “a stopgap between novels.” The New York Observer says “These stories feel like the B-sides off a really great record, which makes you all the more hungry for that sci-fi apocalypse book.”
While I loved The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and while I’m excited about the apocalypse book too, I’m not ready to relegate these stories to the flip side of Diaz’s career. These are good stories. These are really good stories, and if I ever get the chance, I’d like to teach them in a workshop on killer endings. …
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