Salon.com > Fiction http://www.salon.com Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 “Frankenstein” remixed http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/frankenstein_remixed_salpart/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/frankenstein_remixed_salpart/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12912119 Whatever interactive fiction is (and we’re still figuring that out) it suffers from all the problems of traditional fiction and then some. The vast majority of novels and short stories aren’t much good, but when a branching fiction — along the lines of the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s books — fails to engage, the first impulse is to blame the form rather than the content. Let “Frankenstein,” just released by Inkle Studios and Profile Books, serve as a reproach to that reflex. The app is a creative, subtle and sensitive adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novella, and it has singlehandedly renewed this critic’s hopes for interactive fiction.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/frankenstein_remixed_salpart/feed/ 2 “The Cove”: A mysterious skull http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/the_cove_ron_rash_salpart/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/the_cove_ron_rash_salpart/#comments Sat, 28 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12911175 Ron Rash's atmospheric, strangely uncomplicated novel, "The Cove," begins with a scene of melancholy and abandonment, the promise of obliteration, and a shocking discovery. It is 1953 and a man called Parton, a scout for the Tennessee Valley Authority, is investigating a remote parcel of land in North Carolina's Appalachia for inhabitants who will have to be evicted in advance of the valley's inundation. In a small notch -- from which the book takes its title -- over which looms a light-exterminating, anvil-shaped cliff, he finds a deserted farm. Pasture fenced by sagging barbed wire, a collapsed barn, a cabin and two wells are the desolate relicts of past life and labor. The general doominess of the setting is further enhanced by an ash tree decked in charms against evil forces, dead American chestnut trees (victims of the plague that wiped them out across the land), and the memory of the now extinct Carolina parakeet. Parton, thirsty, manages to winch up a bucket of water from one of the wells -- and with it a human skull.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/the_cove_ron_rash_salpart/feed/ 0 “Kingdom Come”: Terror in the London suburbs http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/kingdom_come_terror_in_the_london_suburbs_salpart/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/kingdom_come_terror_in_the_london_suburbs_salpart/#comments Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12910607 J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China, and returned to England in 1946, having been interned with his family in a Japanese prison camp, an experience that inspired his most popular novel, "Empire of the Sun." Ballard's astonishing fiction ranges across continents and galaxies, but a quiet London suburb was his home until his death in 2009, and it is to the suburbs that he returned in his last novel, "Kingdom Come." In its opening pages, the narrator, a London advertising executive named Richard Pearson, travels to one of the "perimeter towns dozing against the protective shoulder of the M25" to find out who murdered his father.  It sounds like the setup for a cosy English mystery.  But this is Ballard.  It will not be cosy.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/kingdom_come_terror_in_the_london_suburbs_salpart/feed/ 1 Gay literature’s new wrinkle http://www.salon.com/2012/04/24/gay_literatures_new_wrinkle/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/24/gay_literatures_new_wrinkle/#comments Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:59:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12908609 This week sees the publication of "The Hunger Angel," by the Romanian-born German author Herta Müller. It’s her first novel to appear in English since she won the Nobel Prize three years ago, and the book, set in a Soviet labor camp in the years after World War II, arrives in America trailing behind it a passel of rave reviews in the European press: a masterpiece, they say, to be put next to Solzhenitsyn or Primo Levi.

But, more quietly, "The Hunger Angel" is something else – a major addition to the tradition of gay literature, and a rare evocation of gay life in the war years and after. Leo, the narrator, is just a teenager when he’s deported from Romania to the Ukraine, but he has already had his first “strange, filthy, shameless and beautiful” assignations in the town park and the local bathhouse. At first he sees his deportation as a welcome escape from his Nazi-supporting father, and a mercy for the mother he truly loves, for in his own eyes he is a double disgrace: not just gay, but an ethnic German who sleeps with Romanians. In the camp, hunger becomes all-consuming, and he longs for home, but he also watches fellow skin-and-bones detainees sneak off to an industrial wreck for sex and knows, “If I’d been caught in the camp I’d be dead.” "The Hunger Angel" lets a gay man embody universal themes of suffering and endurance but also captures the unique contradictions of gay desire – a substantial accomplishment, and one that’s even more impressive because Herta Müller is a straight woman.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/24/gay_literatures_new_wrinkle/feed/ 71 Pulitzers snub fiction http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/pulitzers_snub_fiction/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/pulitzers_snub_fiction/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12875761 The news that no Pulitzer Prize for fiction would be awarded this year came like a slap across the face to a book world still reeling from a Department of Justice suit filed against publishers trying to forestall an Amazon e-book monopoly. Double ouch! But does the Pulitzer snub mean that no good fiction was published in America last year?

I would (and have) argued otherwise, most strenuously; 2011 was an exceptional year for fiction, American and otherwise. I also suspect that the Pulitzer Board itself has not turned up its collective nose at every book produced by American novelists and short story writers in 2011. The Pulitzer Prize may wield far more clout with book buyers than any other American prize for fiction. It can turn an obscure title into a success and a modestly successful title into a bestseller. Readers take it seriously and snap up the books it honors by the thousands. But that doesn't mean that the Pulitzer Prize for fiction doesn't suffer from the same problems that afflict every literary prize, no matter its size or influence.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/16/pulitzers_snub_fiction/feed/ 23 “Schmidt Steps Back”: A fascinating character study http://www.salon.com/2012/04/08/schmidt_steps_back_a_fascinating_character_study/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/08/schmidt_steps_back_a_fascinating_character_study/#comments Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12816681 Louis Begley was 58 and a partner in the prestigious law firm Debevoise & Plimpton when he began his literary career with "Wartime Lies" (1991), the quasi-autobiographical account of a young Jew's tenuous survival in Nazi-conquered Poland. But he soon turned his talents to the manners, mores, and malignancies of the privileged 1 percent. The very, very rich as well as the merely rich professionals -- lawyers, psychiatrists, bankers -- who attend them populate the eight Begley novels that have been published since his debut. Albert Schmidt, who, like Begley, was a top-notch, Harvard-educated attorney in a white-shoe firm, made his first appearance in "About Schmidt" (1996) -- a novel that shares almost nothing with Alexander Payne's 2002 screen adaptation, starring Jack Nicholson, except the title. Widowed, troubled by his only daughter's marriage to a deceitful shyster, and smitten with a 20-year-old waitress, Schmidt returned for an encore in "Schmidt Delivered" (2000). His reemergence 12 years later, in "Schmidt Steps Back," is cause for celebration. Like Leslie Epstein's Leib Goldkorn, Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe, Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman, and John Updike's Harry Angstrom, Begley's Schmidt is a character on whom author and readers are loath to close the book.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/08/schmidt_steps_back_a_fascinating_character_study/feed/ 0 “Satantango”: Eloquent melancholia http://www.salon.com/2012/04/07/satantango_eloquent_melancholia/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/07/satantango_eloquent_melancholia/#comments Sat, 07 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12816241 Barnes & Noble ReviewMy friend Mary Ellen once approvingly likened the experience of reading a novel by W. G. Sebald to having an autumn chill trapped in the threads of one's sweater. I recalled her aperçu while tussling with the work of the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai -- a less delicate but no less eloquent purveyor of melancholia. (It's no surprise that the New Directions edition of his novel "Satantango" carries a quotation from Sebald.) If  one cared to gauge the book's median climate, near the end there is a part in which Irimiás -- a charlatan around whom many of the characters pitch their hopes -- illuminates the seasonal affective disorder clouding his environment:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/07/satantango_eloquent_melancholia/feed/ 0 “Suddenly, a Knock on the Door”: Absurdist Israeli stories http://www.salon.com/2012/04/05/suddenly_a_knock_on_the_door_absurdist_israeli_stories/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/05/suddenly_a_knock_on_the_door_absurdist_israeli_stories/#comments Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12788111 Fans of public radio's "This American Life" have endured no shortage of the breezy yet fully imagined vignettes of Israeli life written and read by Etgar Keret, but long-suffering readers have had to wait four years for his latest collection, "Suddenly, a Knock on the Door." They can be reassured that far more pleasures than perils will reward their patience. In its seemingly random, absurdist pages, a counterfeit shekel ends up having more value than a genuine one, a goldfish possesses the ability to confer magic wishes for good or ill, and stories fold back on themselves so that they present their own sense of déjà vu -- a strange, bedeviling, and often (but not always) happy sensation. Readers may be either put off or enchanted by the playfulness, but at their best the stories convey a sense that the world is knowable on some level we can't verbalize.  Nevertheless, we couldn't help but try, and in a flurry of recent emails, we managed to entice Mr. Keret to say a few words about his process.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/05/suddenly_a_knock_on_the_door_absurdist_israeli_stories/feed/ 0 “The Angst-Ridden Executive”: Cerebral meets noir http://www.salon.com/2012/04/02/the_angst_ridden_executive_montalban/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/02/the_angst_ridden_executive_montalban/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12768381 The Catalan poet, playwright and essayist Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1939–2003) was also a crime novelist who was acquainted with crime: political and recreational. Jailed for four years under Spain's fascist Franco regime, the leftist writer cultivated an understandably -- and exquisitely -- ironic view of zealots in particular and humanity in general. Indeed, it is easy to see Montalbán in the detective he created, Pepe Carvalho, an intellectual, ex-Communist veteran and gourmand who is at home only in his beloved Barcelona.

Barnes & Noble ReviewCarvalho is at the center of 19 novels, many of them set in post-Franco Spain. His youth and his glory days are behind him. As one character in "The Angst-Ridden Executive" observes, they were "the best years of our lives -- if you leave aside the political persecution, the brutality … and the darkness ruling the country." Such cynical humor peppers this lean thriller in which Montalbán strikes the perfect balance between European cerebral and American noir. He also reins in the lengthy political and philosophical digressions that deflate other Pepe Carvalho novels: "Murder in the Central Committee," for example, and to a lesser degree "The Buenos Aires Quintet."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/02/the_angst_ridden_executive_montalban/feed/ 1 “The Zone”: The life of a prison guard http://www.salon.com/2012/04/01/the_zone_sergei_dovlatov/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/01/the_zone_sergei_dovlatov/#comments Sun, 01 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12767791 Rare is the novel in which the narrator halts his story to address his prospective publisher, but such a technique recurs throughout Sergei Dovlatov's "The Zone," a 1982 work -- reissued earlier this year by Counterpoint -- that seems to dare you to classify it.

Barnes & Noble Review"For three years now I have been trying to publish my prison-camp book," the narrator -- a stand-in for Dovlatov -- remarks early on, setting up a sort of book-within-a-book scenario or, at least, the hint of one. So it comes as some surprise, as you read on, that this is an undertaking devoid of any artifice or gimmickry, with the conversational asides -- and the stories that begin by addressing his publisher -- having the effect of bolstering the narrator's confidence, as he escorts us through a number of camp vignettes that are by turns brutal, hilarious, sobering, and, curiously, relatable, even if you're not the prison camp type. "I was friends with a man who had once upon a time pickled his wife and a children in a barrel," our man states. Not for shock value, but rather as the start of a systematic dissection of how prison camp life takes on the mores of regular life, as though it is not a setting that shapes a person but rather the individual that creates or destroys whatever order -- and truth -- a given setting may provide.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/01/the_zone_sergei_dovlatov/feed/ 3 “Devil in the Grove”: A chilling civil rights case http://www.salon.com/2012/03/31/devil_in_the_grove_gilbert_king/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/31/devil_in_the_grove_gilbert_king/#comments Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12767111 In July 1949, a young white couple, Norma and Willie Padgett, told police that 17-year-old Norma had been raped by four black men near Groveland, Fla., setting in motion one of the most dramatic civil rights cases of the 20th century. Gilbert King's "Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America" re-creates an important yet overlooked moment in American history with a chilling, atmospheric narrative that reads more like a Southern Gothic novel than a work of history.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/31/devil_in_the_grove_gilbert_king/feed/ 10 “Another Time, Another Life”: Sweden’s slighted crime series http://www.salon.com/2012/03/26/another_time_another_life_swedens_slighted_crime_series/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/26/another_time_another_life_swedens_slighted_crime_series/#comments Mon, 26 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12725761 I just hope that Leif GW Persson's extraordinary novels based around the still-unsolved assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme don't founder on their titles in this country. "Another Time, Another Life," the title of the second in the trilogy, just published here, is not quite so elusive as the first, "Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End," but neither has made extolling the novels' greatness in conversations anything but a fumble-fraught trial. Still I persist, because the first two volumes (a translated edition of the third volume is slated to appear later this year) have no peer among the host of Swedish crime novels that continue to sweep America. Though the books are connected and are peopled by many of the same characters, they can be read out of order, although the surprises they offer will be different.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/26/another_time_another_life_swedens_slighted_crime_series/feed/ 0 “Carry the One”: After the accident http://www.salon.com/2012/03/23/carry_the_one_after_the_accident/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/23/carry_the_one_after_the_accident/#comments Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12722161 Carol Anshaw wastes no time in setting the world to spinning in "Carry the One," her wonderful and often funny fourth novel. It's 1983, moments after Carmen and Matt's wedding, held in the backyard of a hipster farmhouse in the Wisconsin boonies. Carmen's sister, Alice, and Matt's sister, Maude, are in an upstairs bedroom, making out. Carmen's brother, Nick, only 19 and already a brilliant grad student in astronomy, is in the attic with his stoner girlfriend, Olivia. Nick's wearing a wedding dress, Olivia's in a powder-blue tux, and they're both out of their minds on mushrooms. Carmen, meanwhile, dressed in an "ironic red" bridal gown and visibly pregnant, is having second (and third) thoughts about her sudden marriage.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/23/carry_the_one_after_the_accident/feed/ 2 “Coral Glynn”: Gothic, revisited http://www.salon.com/2012/03/19/coral_glynn_gothic_revisited/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/19/coral_glynn_gothic_revisited/#comments Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12686801 A big, dark house in the English countryside, with its brooding, damaged master; the pretty but gawky young woman who comes to work there -- and to stumble over secrets in gloomy hallways: These are the elements of an old-fashioned gothic tale, and also of Peter Cameron's lovely, enigmatic new novel, "Coral Glynn."

Cameron, who is best known for his YA hit, "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You," has written a string of slender, pristinely crafted adult books that have acquired a passionate cadre of admirers. Despite their variety, each of these books has a still, slightly eerie quality, like the branch, adorned with stuffed hummingbirds and covered by a glass dome, that Coral contemplates in the sitting room at Hart House. Cameron's fiction is not as frankly surreal as the work of Haruki Murakami, but it has the same perfume of dreamland about it, full of mysterious figures and images, and the sensation of time slowed down and sidetracked into some back alleyway of eternity.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/19/coral_glynn_gothic_revisited/feed/ 2 “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh”: The first story of the Armenian genocide http://www.salon.com/2012/03/18/the_forty_days_of_musa_dagh_franz_werfel/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/18/the_forty_days_of_musa_dagh_franz_werfel/#comments Sun, 18 Mar 2012 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12681681 In August 1939, to warm his commanders' cold feet before invading Poland, Adolf Hitler is alleged to have asked: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Silence gainsays guilt. Today, in 2012, it is illegal in Turkey to speak about those deaths -- more than a million during and after World War I -- as genocide. In France, however, denying that Armenians were singled out for slaughter is a crime. The word genocide was coined, by Raphael Lemkin, only in 1944, but it is now applied not only to the liquidation of Lemkin's fellow European Jews but also to campaigns of extermination in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur and elsewhere. Except in Turkey, it is widely applied, retroactively, to the Armenian bloodbath almost a century ago.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/18/the_forty_days_of_musa_dagh_franz_werfel/feed/ 11 Believing in love http://www.salon.com/2012/03/18/rainshadow_road_lisa_kleypas/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/18/rainshadow_road_lisa_kleypas/#comments Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12682911 Lisa Kleypas has become one of the most successful writers of historical romance fiction working today. But with her latest novel, "Rainshadow Road," she departs from her usual 19th century milieu to fashion a charming, deeply felt novel that knits together contemporary romance and magical realism. The following is a transcript of a recent conversation I had with Lisa Kleypas about writing, magic and the complex emotional world she creates for her characters.

Barnes & Noble ReviewThe Barnes & Noble Review: "Rainshadow Road" is a deeply moving romantic novel, but it's definitely not a "paranormal" romance. Your heroine, Lucy Marinn, has the ability to change glass into living creatures, so the shards of a broken ornament turn to "living sparks," a dancing procession of fireflies, for example. In a paranormal romance, the heroine herself might change shape, though generally into a member of the cat family rather than a firefly, but a shape-changer has presumably lived with her feline self for most of her life. Within the context of the world of the romance, her abilities are normal. But Lucy is quite ordinary except that, as you put it, she knows that "the distance between ordinary and extraordinary was only a step, a breath, a heartbeat away." Why? Why magical realism?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/18/rainshadow_road_lisa_kleypas/feed/ 5 “The Vanishers”: The secret lives of women http://www.salon.com/2012/03/17/the_vanishers_heidi_julavits/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/17/the_vanishers_heidi_julavits/#comments Sat, 17 Mar 2012 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12681571 For all that we think of our world as somehow post-feminist, the words "women's fiction" and "high literature" still seen to occupy different real estate, and I don't need to say which of these rents space 17 floors below the penthouse. Heidi Julavits has spent much of her career as a writer of fiction -- this is her fourth novel -- using the brute strength of her considerable intellect and ambitious style to winch the nonworking elevator to the top of the building. In most of her work, the world of female concerns becomes, simply, the world.

Barnes & Noble ReviewIn "The Uses of Enchantment" (2006), Julavits turned a surveyor's eye on the emotional life of girls at the brink of womanhood, unsure how to get there after the road signs were unscrupulously switched by adults who should have been more considerate guides. Here she coined the style of compression she uses to impressive effect in her new novel, and for many of the same psychologically observant aims ("Part of her allure could be attributed to the fact that people felt self-congratulatory when they discovered it, as though this said something special about them and their unique powers of perception").

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/17/the_vanishers_heidi_julavits/feed/ 8 A gritty tale of obsession http://www.salon.com/2012/03/11/by_blood_ellen_ullman/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/11/by_blood_ellen_ullman/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12659701 In Ellen Ullman's searing novel about storytelling and the hunt for belonging, "By Blood," the disturbing signals come early. Our unnamed narrator, who we slowly learn is a professor under suspicion for unclear but pseudo-sexual misconduct, has been forced to take leave from a similarly nameless university. He has decided to pass out his exile in the hairy, radical and dark atmosphere of 1970s San Francisco, a setting akin to but standing in marked contrast to the Silicon Valley of a decade later, where the author set her previous novel "Bug." This is the Bay Area before its tech-fueled transformation, caked in an uneasy mixture of grime and politics, with nary a foodie or a wine country tour in sight. The gritty gray of a Hitchcock noir is overlaid with a psychedelic smoky sheen, and our narrator -- the erstwhile professor of some unnamed topic -- ranges through a slightly decaying fortress that houses transient people, radical subcultures and perhaps even a serial killer.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/11/by_blood_ellen_ullman/feed/ 3 Jonathan Franzen and the Web will never get along http://www.salon.com/2012/03/10/jonathan_franzen_and_the_web_will_never_get_along/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/10/jonathan_franzen_and_the_web_will_never_get_along/#comments Sat, 10 Mar 2012 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12665761 "You eventually can't ignore what's fraudulent or secondhand in your own pages. … If you really love fiction you'll find that the only pages worth keeping are the ones that reflect you as you really are."
– Jonathan Franzen, in a 2011 commencement address at Kenyon College

Before the Internet trained its full shaming power on brutal warlord Joseph Kony, it was a bad week online to be Jonathan Franzen. Well, another bad week.

Franzen might be the most acclaimed and the bestselling major American writer of his time, but he's about as popular online as an Occupy protester is at Davos. On one hand, Franzen's become the vehicle through which the literary world discusses big issues: the comparable attention paid to male and female writers, the value of reading online versus reading print books, the purpose of the novel in an electronic age, whether truly important fiction needs to be accessible to all or an experiment with language and form.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/10/jonathan_franzen_and_the_web_will_never_get_along/feed/ 88 A sex traffic mystery http://www.salon.com/2012/03/10/hanging_hill_mo_hayder/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/10/hanging_hill_mo_hayder/#comments Sat, 10 Mar 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12656311 Nobody concludes a novel quite the way Mo Hayder does: with a revelation that leaves the reader staring at the page, poleaxed, willing more words to appear or flicking back to see just how she did it. Hayder's astonishing 2007 horror novel "Pig Island," for example, ended with the stunned narrator, framed for murder, watching his nemesis depart and "something coiled and dark, like smoke or a spirit, lifting itself out of the car and hovering near the roof…" Now, on the final page of "Hanging Hill," a mother lovingly watches her young daughter and a friend drive off to the Glastonbury Festival. "The van turned left. Not right, the way she would have gone…. Leave them alone, she thought…. You just can't go on worrying about your children for ever." Worrying: a quaint, domestic impulse; utterly redundant in the terrifying world that Hayder creates.

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