Jay Miskowiec Rain Taxi

Published twenty-five years after Julio Cortázar’s death, Papeles inesperados (Unexpected Writings) brings together a vast range of little-known texts by the Argentine author. Though not all technically “unpublished” works, many previously having appeared in newspapers or magazines, this trove varying in style and genre offers Cortázar fans and scholars a fresh look at his work. Co-edited by Carles Álvarez Garriga and Cortázar’s literary executor and former wife, Aurora Bernárdez, Papeles inesperados is among the most important books published in Spanish in 2009.

Jorge Luis Borges said that while Mexicans descended from the Aztecs, and Peruvians from the Incas, the Argentines descended from boats. That connection, closer to the old world than the new, has often set Argentines apart culturally from other Latin Americans. Even to call Cortázar an Argentine is incomplete. Born in Brussels in 1914, he grew up in Argentina but moved to Paris in 1951, where he wrote most of his notable work and where he died. While writers like Miguel Ángel Asturias and Gabriel García Márquez were forging a style that would become known as magical realism—based upon the very history of the Americas, where one need not look beyond the reality of this world to find the magical, the astonishing, the marvelous—Cortázar would be influenced by surrealism and the novelists of the nouvel roman like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Philippe Sollers, where punctuation and syntax were as important as words in conveying character and setting. (Read More)

Janet Maslin | The New York Times

What does a writer do when he has already won the Man Booker Prize and can make copacetic use of words like preterite, spalpeen, goitrous and phthistic? In the case of John Banville, whose accolades also include the Guinness Peat Aviation award, the answer has been to take a pseudonymous flight of escapism into genre fiction.

So this Janus-faced author has two current novels: “The Infinities,” a convoluted marvel about Greek deities wreaking havoc in the household of a dying theoretical mathematician, and “Elegy for April,” the third installment in a crime series credited to Benjamin Black. As this very busy author told an interviewer, Banville writes meticulously; Black just writes fast. It’s a toss-up as to which of them has more fun.

“The Infinities,” a much merrier novel than its premise might suggest, is the exponentially more elaborate effort. It is derived from Heinrich von Kleist’s 1807 play “Amphitryon,” about the Theban general of the title. (Synergy alert: Mr. Banville has adapted Kleist plays for the stage, including this one.) And a character in “The Infinities,” an actress, is named Helen. In addition to the other classical allusions she provides, Helen has been cast in “Amphitryon” as Alcmene, a woman seduced by mythology’s best-known stealth lady killer, Zeus. (Read More)

Jenny Dunning | Rain Taxi

FLUG /fləg´/ n. 1. A substance reputed to wash haze from some, but not all, early mornings. 2. By extension, any act or word or image which clears ambiguous action and verbiage from any given group of co-terminous situations selected by chance or, barring chance, by outright chicanery.

You won’t find flug in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, or even in the OED. It’s a word from Sid Gershgoren’s “imaginary dictionary,” The Extended Words. Yet, like so many of Gershgoren’s inventions, once you’ve encountered it, it seems like a word English should have.

The author of four books of poetry, Gershgoren has compiled a list of plausible-sounding words, defined them, and provided invented quotations that demonstrate their use. The words range from pure whimsy—such as galisse, a shoe that knows where its wearer wants to go and how to get there—to barbed rants aimed at intellectuals and mass culture alike, as in synecdofuge, “a device used to expel verbal, long-range, parasitic reductionisms.” Some are onomatopoetic—pecta pecta, an often fatal stuttering disorder—while others, like ikristics (frozen particles of air indistinguishable from snowflakes) wear their etymology on their sleeves. (Read More)

Michael Pinker | Review of Contemporary Fiction

Vladimir Brik intends to write a novel about the senseless murder of Ukrainian Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch by Chicago’s chief of police in 1908, the event’s historical backdrop calling attention to a widespread xenophobia riveting the national consciousness, stirred by the news media to fever pitch. A Bosnian immigrant like his creator, married to an Irish-American surgeon, Brik feels guilty at his lack of publication and dependence on his wife. A chance encounter leads him to win a grant to support research on the unfortunate Lazarus, who survived a pogrom to seek the American dream, only to be gunned down in his new home shortly afterward. Hemon’s double narrative begins with Lazarus’s murder, then alternates between events surrounding its aftermath and the peregrinations of Brik and his slick sidekick, Rora Halilbašić, photographer and raconteur, whose winning savoir faire spices the pair’s efforts to comb Lazarus’s past in the old country. (Read More)

David Marcus Dissent Magazine

J.M. Coetzee made an early career out of ambivalence. Restrained and impersonal, he mined the caverns of despair from the safe distance of allegory and literary appropriation. Life and Times of Michael K, his 1983 Booker Prize winner, tracked the itinerant life of a slow-witted gardener in the sparse prose of Kafka. Foe, a work of revisionist and feminist genius, challenged the rugged masculinity of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe by inhabiting the voice of an imagined female companion. Master of Petersburg occupied not only the melancholic timbre of a Dostoevsky novel—it was, after all, about the great master—but also the stilted Victorian English of a Constance Garnett translation.

Over the past decade, however, Coetzee has adopted an increasingly direct and confessional style. Once dedicated to ectomorphic reticence, he has now allowed himself the fattier tissues of biography. Beginning with his second Booker Prize winner, the 1997 Disgrace, he has spoken through a series of half-selves. Reclusive and dissatisfied, the protagonists of Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, and Slow Man laid bare the moral and psychological crises of a midlife colonial: shame and guilt foremost, but also the persistent anxieties of physical and sexual decline.

At first glance, Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee’s most recent entry, seems to follow this “late” tendency toward novelized autobiography. A book of journal entries, it maps the tortuous cartography of Coetzeean doubt through a near biographical stand-in: the eponymous John C, author of Waiting for the Barbarians and recent émigré from South Africa to Australia (a migration Coetzee himself made in 2002). (Read More)