Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 24 Sep 2008 02:22:30 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Benjamin Lytal :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Benjamin+Lytal istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-novel-as-idyll-julian-ayestas-helena-or/86442/ Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Books are often about the same things: the beach, a fire, a memory of sound and light. "The cherry jam shone bright red amongst the black and yellow wasps, and the wind stirred the branches of the oak trees, and spots of sunlight raced over the moss." This sentence, written by Julián Ayesta (1919-96), a Spanish diplomat and sometime author, could stand in for any number of literary memories. There are some books that we talk about with each other. What did Isabella Archer have in mind, at the... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/boy-wonder-james-kelmans-new-novel/85992/ Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Sometimes great writing does not make a great novel. Among the books notably missed on this year's just-announced Booker Prize short list is "Kieron Smith, boy" (Harcourt, 432 pages, $26) by James Kelman, who won the Booker in 1994 for "How late it was, how late." Published earlier this year in England, the new book, a long narrative told in the voice of a young boy, is one of Mr. Kelman's most sustained, impressive efforts — and yet the Booker committee's exclusion of it is no crime. Mr... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/striding-forward-fall-fiction/85961/ Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST In fiction, the fall will be a season not of bright debuts or treacherous sophomore efforts, but of crucial mid-career landmarks. Of course, John Updike will have a new novel, and Philip Roth will publish what might be his best novel in years, "Indignation." And Toni Morrison will publish her slimmest novel yet, "A Mercy," set in the 1680s. But the real interest will be novelists who are only now peaking, who have established reputations but who are publishing their most ambitious work right... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-campaign-season-fall-nonfiction/85971/ Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The November election will dominate this fall's nonfiction season, with entries by pollsters and Web loggers, as well as more seasoned authors, analyzing every possible American future. The books we look forward to take a longer view, examining the past as much as the future. "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency" might once have been received as an intervention in current affairs, but Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman appears to have written a book of history, more concerned with Vice... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/what-david-foster-wallace-left-behind/85801/ Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Picking up a copy of "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace — who died in an apparent suicide on Friday — the reader sees a face on the dust jacket cover too strange to be cool. Slanting his head to the side, as people do when they're writing longhand, Wallace wore a white turtleneck and a white do-rag that smashed his long, elegant bangs down over an unshaven face that was tender, serious, and slightly puffy. The back of a baggy padded armchair was visible, out of focus, behind him. In... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/mourning-and-melancholia-pierre-michons-small/85512/ Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST From an Anglo-American viewpoint, where translations from France are predominated first by Michel Houellebecq, anti-saint, and second by a nimbus of metaphysical detective novels, Pierre Michon at first appears to be a delicious throwback, writing with luxurious self-confidence and unembarrassed depth. "Let us explore a genesis for my pretensions," he begins in his critically acclaimed first novel, now translated by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays as "Small Lives" (Archipelago Press, 214... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/housekeeping-marilynne-robinsons-home/85047/ Wed, 3 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Marilynne Robinson is an anomaly in the great tradition of American literature. One of our few novelists at peace with religion, she isn't interested in the post-Puritanical game of unmasking hypocrisy, of entering into darkness. Unlike Hawthorne's New England, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, or Cormac McCarthy's Texas border country, Ms. Robinson's Gilead comes luminously to life without the aid of chiaroscuro. There is much sadness, but little shadow... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/beyond-politics-the-stories-of-doris-lessing/84665/ Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Doris Lessing appears to be a writer who came, saw, and conquered, dramatizing a few points of sexual and racial correctness before such points were commonplace. Born in 1919 in Persia, and raised in colonial Rhodesia, she arrived in London as a young woman carrying the manuscript for "The Grass Is Singing" (1950), a novel about sexual tension between a racist white woman and a black African man. I first read her in college, not in a literature class but in a course on African history. The 2007... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/tales-from-londonistan-hanif-kureishis-something/84202/ Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Multicultural London has emerged as one of fiction's great subjects in the last 20 years, and Hanif Kureishi has led the way. Edgier than Zadie Smith, and more lively than Monica Ali, Mr. Kureishi has nonetheless not had a hit in recent years. "The Buddha of Suburbia" (1990), his first book, probably remains his most-read, and he is most famous for a still earlier achievement, his screenplay for "My Beautiful Laundrette" (1985). Earlier this year, some English critics hailed his new novel... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/anna-wingers-this-must-be-the-place-theophile/83731/ Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Berlin has been the European "It" city for most of two decades, but American authors have not been attracted in commensurate numbers. Jeffrey Eugenides lived there while writing "Middlesex," but who recently has written anything as memorably Berlin-centric as Christopher Isherwood's "Goodbye to Berlin"? Anna Winger's "This Must Be the Place" (Riverhead, 303 pages, $24.95) is therefore welcome. Ms. Winger, a Massachusetts native who now lives in Berlin with her family, gracefully captures the... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/minding-manners/83242/ Wed, 6 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Corruption is an old story, but globalization has given that story new forms. In Sana Krasikov's debut story collection, "One More Year" (Spiegel & Grau, 229 pages, $21.95), she describes the lives of New York Russians with one foot still in the Old World. In her stories, the precarious, sometimes gut-churning state of affairs in the former Soviet republic of Georgia makes life even more precarious for the illegal immigrants of Long Island and Westchester. In "The Repatriates," one of tightest... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/on-the-road-travel-writing-and-log-of-the-ss/82840/ Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Peter Ferry's "Travel Writing" (Harcourt, 294 pages, $24) is the first debut novel I have read that includes, as a plot point, a forecast of its own sales. "We intend to sell a few books," announces the book's protagonist, who is also named Peter Ferry, as he throws the book down on the table of his enemy Dr. Albert Decarre, whose misdeeds will now be read about all over town, Pete declares, thanks to this book. "Travel Writing" purports to be a book about writing, approaching the subject with... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/war-peace-azuelas-underdogs-and-bosmans-mafeking/82420/ Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Novels that show the sordid side of war are not scarce. Classics abound, but they do not glut; each book is as distinct as its war. Mariano Azuela's "The Underdogs" (Penguin Classics, 148 pages, $8) realizes a war that we often forget, though it is relatively near at hand in time and space. Azuela (1873-1952) participated in the Mexican Revolution (1911-17), serving as a doctor in the army of Pancho Villa, before the fortunes of war sent him packing across the border to El Paso, Texas... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/coming-of-age-in-tokyo-natsuo-kirinos-real-world/81952/ Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Guilty societies fear their children. Though Natsuo Kirino's "Real World" (Alfred A. Knopf, 208 pages, $23.95) concerns only one instance of matricide, the sympathy with which other teenagers take up the cause of the disaffected killer seems to condemn the whole society. When one girl says that parents are like "people who live in some far-off other country," she speaks for all Ms. Kirino's characters: They take commonplaces of teen disillusionment as fact, and live in a world without history... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/speak-Emigre-nabokovs-first-forays-into-english/81474/ Wed, 9 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST In the late 1930s, when Vladimir Nabokov realized that he would have to leave Paris, he saw two probable refuges, England and America, and accordingly began to write in English. "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" (New Directions, 205 pages, $12.95), his first English-language novel, was written on top of a suitcase. Its reissue, accompanied by a new edition of "Laughter in the Dark" (New Directions, 292 pages, $12.95), reminds us how Nabokov organized his entry into English. "Laughter in the... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/go-purple-young-man-rick-basss-why-we-came-west/81091/ Wed, 2 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The trouble with nature writing, a majestic genre, is that its peaks are sometimes purple. Nature cries out for naming, and soon $10 words encrust the page. Nature cries out for understanding, and so spiritualism blows through, inflating sentences. A character of Annie Proulx's leans out of a plane to observe the "great brown and red curves, scooped cirques, rived canyons" of Wyoming. Annie Dillard, walking near Tinker Creek, perceives that "the universe has continued to deal exclusively in... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/reconsiderations-richard-yatess-revolutionary-road/81093/ Wed, 2 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST When "Revolutionary Road" first appeared in 1961, some critics shrugged. Here was another indictment of suburban malaise. "I don't suppose one picture window is necessarily going to destroy our personalities," the book's hero jokes. Its young author, Richard Yates, was praised for his fine handling of language, but the novel itself was called passé and pointlessly cruel. Some critics, including Alfred Kazin, disagreed, but when Yates died in 1992 he was largely forgotten, a writer who had... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-secret-life-of-children/80602/ Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Can adults write about children better than children can? Do adults know more about children than children do? Daisy Ashford, the 9-year-old author of "The Young Visiters" (1919), amused readers not just with her misspellings and her naiveté (she was trying to write a Victorian novel, like the ones she had read), but with her worldview, in which human consciousness is limited to country visits and absurd misunderstandings. But though children may not know how to communicate it, their experience... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/heinrich-heines-high-altitude-irony/80184/ Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST We do not expect books from the distant past to be genuinely funny. Even those that are advertised as rascally and unorthodox tend to amuse only indirectly, as a kind of in-joke for the historically informed reader. Old books that actually make us laugh out loud — Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" being the best example — therefore convince us doubly. Not only do their authors possess rare humor, but they also demonstrate great sincerity. Surely only an author who was truly enjoying himself... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/shuffling-through-memories-bs-johnsons/79721/ Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Samuel Beckett is often called a terminus in Anglo-Irish literature. He took modernism's radical approach as far as it would go; it is as though Jackson Pollock was succeeded by portraitists and landscape artists. B.S. Johnson (1933-73) did not get the memo. In 1961, while shopping his first book to agents, Johnson compared it favorably to "Ulysses," and declared himself in the tradition of "Petronius, Apuleius, Rabelais, Cervantes, Nashe, Sterne, and Samuel Beckett." Tom Stoppard, an early... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/adam-thirlwells-tour-of-the-canon/79253/ Wed, 4 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Bob Dylan went electric, and the crowd booed. But now we know better — acoustic folk music could never have expressed the psychedelic colors about to sprout from Mr. Dylan's head. We receive a similar thrill, of righteous innovation, from many of our most prized literary anecdotes: when Bellow dropped existentialism and wrote "The Adventures of Augie March," for instance. It's a universal pattern: Playfulness triumphs and the artist grins. These are stories we tell ourselves in reveries of... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/standing-witness-horacio-moyas-senselessness/78702/ Wed, 28 May 2008 00:00:00 EST One index of the death or life of the novel must be its political relevance, and it's no coincidence that the repeated flourishing of Latin-American literature has a lot to do with that region's seemingly bottomless reserve of war and strife. The most recent flourishing — at least as it appears to an English-language reader — centers on Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), a Chilean who fictionalized the catastrophes of not only his home country but of Mexico and, in "Nazi Literature in the Americas,"... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/how-to-make-fiction-now/76755/ Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 EST 'Ethnic literature's hot. And important too." These words of advice, given to Nam Le's fictional alternate ego, resonate through his debut story collection like an ironical call to arms. Of the seven stories that make up "The Boat" (Knopf, 272 pages, $22.95), only three are plausibly autobiographical. The rest flout the traditional maxim "Write what you know," taking on characters as diverse as Colombian drug lords, Iranian feminists, and a New York painter who sounds a lot like Lucian Freud... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/on-holiday/76407/ Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Guy de Maupassant's "Afloat" (NYRB Classics, 105 pages, $14) is the memoir of a failed vacation. Immediately translated upon publication in 1889, it has since been out of print in English. Douglas Parmée's fresh new translation brings to light a book that, more so than any of his renowned short stories, shows Maupassant the man, as he might have been known to contemporary readers of his copious journalism in fin de siècle Paris. Recounting a short week spent yachting on the French Riviera... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/american-carnival-tobias-wolffs-our-story-begins/75953/ Wed, 7 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Tobias Wolff is a master story writer, whose name should be mentioned alongside Raymond Carver's in any account of the short story's much-noted 1980s renaissance. Unlike Carver, Mr. Wolff is still very much with us, and the 10 new stories collected in "Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories" (Knopf, $26.95, 379 pages) show no sign of a slackening. With "This Boy's Life" (1989), his memoir, the present collection represents a summary of Mr. Wolff's claim to enduring importance in the recent... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/clean-well-lighted-life-dominque-fabres/75580/ Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Like white wine on a rainy afternoon, Dominique Fabre's English debut is both relaxing and a little bracing. The story of a 56-year-old barkeeper whose employers may, suddenly, be closing shop, "The Waitress Was New" (Archipelago Books, 160 pages, $15) transcends the slice-of-life category to which it would otherwise belong. Having written nine works of fiction, in French, since 1995, Mr. Fabre is a minimalist who's not afraid to insist on his themes, and "The Waitress Was New" becomes a... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/grete-weils-aftershocks/75134/ Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST "He's trying to look like one of those Londoners from the City, but he looks very Jewish, just as he always has, and very German as well." So writes Grete Weil (1906-99), describing the unlikable New York Jew who suffers her scrutiny in the first of the seven allegorical tales that make up "Aftershocks" (David R. Godine/Verba Mundi, 192 pages, $16.95). Born in 1906, in Munich, Weil studied German literature and married a dramaturge, Edgar Weil. Edgar died in the Mauthausen concentration camp in... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/fiction-of-the-post-communist-era/74784/ Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST György Dragomán's debut novel, "The White King" (Houghton Mifflin, 272 pages, $24), could be called the best of all fictional worlds. A memoir of communist oppression, it is also an of-the-moment contribution to world literature, representing the childlike combination of wonder and irony currently in vogue across the globe. Authors as geographically diverse as Haruki Murakami, Jenny Erpenbeck, and César Aira have been using childlike voices to navigate sinister terrain with varying degrees of... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/school-ties/74421/ Wed, 9 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST 'Gossip Girl" doesn't have much to do with the tradition of old school bildungsroman built by Knowles, Salinger, and Richard Yates — but it does have something to do with one of the best private school novels to appear in recent years. With commendations from John Ashbery, and sentences that often demand rereading, Christine Schutt has mainly appealed to readers who don't begrudge a prose its small risks. In "All Souls" (Harcourt, 240 pages, $22), her second novel, she makes a bid for wider... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/rethinking-what-henry-james-knew/74035/ Wed, 2 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST It makes sense that Cynthia Ozick, a natural essayist, has made the novella the preferred vessel for her fiction. In the 1970s, she made her reputation as a fiction-writer with stories, and her two most celebrated novels, "The Puttermesser Papers (1997)" and "The Shawl (1980)" comprise linked stories. In Ms. Ozick's nimble hands, a novella — 30 to 70 pages long — can accomplish as much as an essay, sketching out a premise, holding a number of ideas up to the light. At their best, novellas trace... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/madness-and-civilization/73621/ Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST We talk about psychological novels without expecting their authors to have any particular expertise in psychology. Novelists go on instinct, we understand. Henry James described a "sublime confidence" that allowed him to write about the inner lives of others, and we ask no more — and often less — of contemporary authors. What, then, to make of a psychological novel written by a practicing psychiatrist? António Lobo Antunes, who has been in residence at Lisbon's Hospital Miguel Bombarda since... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/master-builder/73234/ Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Tsutomu Mizukami is unknown in English, though his two most famous works have long been available in French. Now "The Temple of the Wild Geese" and "Bamboo Dolls of Echizen" (Dalkey Archive Press, 208 pages, $22.95) have been translated by Dennis Washburn and collected in one volume. Equated in Japan with other mid-century greats, such as Georges Simenon and Patricia Highsmith, who brought high literary values to the mystery genre, Mizukami helped pioneer intelligent detective fiction in Japan... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/fictions-travels/73214/ Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST First novels are supposed to be thinly veiled autobiographies, but only one of this season's debuts looks to be just that: n+1 founder Keith Gessen's "All the Sad Young Literary Men" (Viking, April), about writers wishing they had something other than their own personal lives — something international, even world-historical — to write about. Almost everyone else in this commercial category — hot debut novelist — has simply gone ahead and written about the world-historical. Sadie Jones, with... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/basement-tapes/72737/ Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Jonathan Coe titled his last novel "The Closed Circle" (2004), and his new book, "The Rain Before It Falls" (Knopf, 240 pages, $23.95), could fittingly be described as the start of something new. It could also be Mr. Coe's breakthrough in America. The author of large-cast social novels, like "What a Carve Up!" (1994), an anti-Thatcherite satire, and "The Rotter's Club" (2001), about young people in the 1970s in the English Midlands, Mr. Coe has sometimes seemed too culturally specific a writer... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/kafka-lightens-up/72361/ Wed, 5 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST The last 10 years have seen subtle but important changes in Kafka's American reputation. Until the late 1990s, our standard Kafka translations were those done in the 1930s by Edwin and Willa Muir. Then, in 1998, Schocken Books published vital new translations of "The Castle" and "The Trial." Not only were these based on restored German texts — and hence fundamentally more accurate than the Muirs' — but they sought to combat the Muirs' early and incomplete idea of Kafka, as printed in their old... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/getting-to-the-bottom-of-bolao/71926/ Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST The Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño must be our most acclaimed translated author since W.G. Sebald. I think he deserves it. But unlike the late German, whose quietly devastating books have a restrained, finished quality, Bolaño reads like literary gunpowder, and his reputation has felt combustible, especially since the translation of "The Savage Detectives," and its massive reception, last year. The action in Bolaño's novels revolves around obscure poets and their cliques — action that would be... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/finnish-endgame/71565/ Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST The first proper Finnish novel was not written until late in the 19th century. Appearing in 1870, "Seven Brothers," by Aleksis Kivi, was eventually translated into many languages, but perhaps none of them were as unique or as isolated as Finnish itself. Even today we hear almost nothing of literature from Finland — "The Parson's Widow" (Dalkey Archive Press, 280 pages, $13.95) by Marja-Liisa Vartio, first published in 1967 and newly translated by Aili and Austin Flint, is the first Finnish... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/returning-to-a-safe-place/71221/ Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST A new book by Steven Millhauser means a substantial treat. He may criticize the pleasures of escapism in his fiction, but he provides them himself. Like Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme, he takes the institutions of fun — parks, pleasure domes, fun houses — as his subject matter. But unlike these writers, Mr. Millhauser never quite makes a joke of it. Unlike so many of the postmodern American writers he superficially resembles, he is not especially interested in sex, or even in wit. Instead... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/song-of-myself/70797/ Wed, 6 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Though not recognized as an experimental author, John Edgar Wideman is one of the most demanding writers in America today. His novels, and even his short stories, are part of a densely woven conversation, one that depends on the reader's knowledge of Mr. Wideman's past books and his biography. It's a one-sided conversation, and often less than involving. But even readers who sometimes wonder if Mr. Wideman lets the sound of his voice carry too many verbose passages, will admit that few... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/reading-lolita-in-cairo/70413/ Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST By the time he wrote "Morning and Evening Talk" (1987), Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) could afford to experiment as few writers can. He had long ago written his realist masterpiece, "The Cairo Trilogy" (1957), and had followed it up with a profound religious allegory in "The Children of Gebelawi" (1959). By 1987, when "Morning and Evening Talk" (American University in Cairo Press, 192 pages, $19.95) was first published in Egypt, Mahfouz was already an old master, looking for new ways to impose his... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/eichmann-in-budapest/70047/ Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST After Hungarian writer Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize in 2002, his political enemies called the award "conscience money" — as if given to Mr. Kertész because of his sufferings in the Holocaust, rather than for his writing. Very few critics have agreed, but until now, English readers have been able to find little in Mr. Kertész's work that is not based on his experiences during World War II. If Auschwitz is the "zero point," as Mr. Kertész has called it, around which the human condition turns... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/second-act-for-radicals/69589/ Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Though not strictly a satirist, the British novelist Hari Kunzru has been compared to writers of biting wit like Evelyn Waugh, and for good reason: His novels are so topical that, despite dramatic plots, their appeal is analytic and implicitly humorous. "My Revolutions" (Dutton, 288 pages, $25.95), his third novel, takes on the wry perspective of an aging hippie — one who may have actually participated in political violence but who, by 1998, is content to roll his eyes at his wife's BMW. The... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/watching-day-break/69178/ Wed, 9 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST There is something about A.L. Kennedy's writing that creates awkward expectations. Reviews of her novels often follow a similar pattern: High regard for her ambitious technique sets up disappointment with the book itself. An accomplished, lyrical sentence working within a rigorous stream of consciousness leads the critic to think: This is where the psychological novel is, now. Ms. Kennedy has indeed inherited something vital from the likes of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Knut Hamsun, and Virginia Woolf... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/problem-with-originalism/68772/ Wed, 2 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Who believes in editors? The title of a new version of James Agee's posthumous novel, "A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text" (University of Tennessee Press, 582 pages, $49.95), implies that an author's text is something an editor can only diminish. Of course, this restored version has its own editor, Michael Lofaro, who argues that the previous version, edited by Agee's longtime friend David McDowell, published in 1957 and quickly canonized, "was far more a construct of its... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/first-great-saudi-novel/68553/ Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Driven mad by city life, the hero of Gogol's "Diary of a Madman" (1835) decides that he is Ferdinand VIII, the King of Spain. Whisked off to the sanatorium, he meets other exotic potentates — the Dey of Algiers, for instance — and men with shaved heads who seem to be Chinese. His flight, from sanity and from the humiliating vagaries of bureaucratic St. Petersburg, is to an arid land of magic, one that predates the modern city. But Turad, the hero of Yousef Al-Mohaimeed's "Wolves of the Crescent... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/long-and-winding-road/68341/ Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST The last book by Julio Cortázar (1914–84), the celebrated Argentinean postmodernist, does not look like a love story. Finally translated by Anne McLean, "Autonauts of the Cosmoroute" (Archipelago, 354 pages, $20) has the appearance of a novelty, a travelogue set on the blasé freeway that connects Paris with Marseille. A second glance, reading into the prologue, suggests that the travelogue may be no more than an elaborate, mock-heroic gag, in which Cortázar and his co-author, Carol Dunlop... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/fiction/68310/ Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Some books are easy to recommend. Most avid readers had heard of Roberto Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives" (FSG, 592 pages, $27) by this April; the buzz had been building for years. The novellas coming out from New Directions since 2003 always seemed like good recommendations: They were short, politically authentic but very youthful, and could be advertised as a kind of Latin American nextwave, something better than magical realism. Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives," a long novel from a big... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/life-is-beautiful/67921/ Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Holocaust novels and memoirs are regularly stunning. The vexed discussion about the propriety of writing after Auschwitz, inaugurated by Theodor Adorno, does not always account for the beautiful work of survivors themselves. A book like Primo Levi's "Survival in Auschwitz" dares to be a good read, in all senses of the phrase. Levi himself references Jack London — whose naturalistic fictions make suffering a mimetic pleasure, just as Levi's own book can make the incidents of Auschwitz engrossing... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/listening-to-the-voice-of-suicide/67509/ Wed, 5 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST When an old text is translated for the first time, it suggests a galaxy of other texts, still waiting to be translated. Just how much is out there that we don't know about? Tetsuo Miura's writing has never been translated into English before, but to judge by "Shame in the Blood" (Shoemaker & Hoard, 216 pages, $24.95), from 1964, he is an outstanding writer, and one who should be of particular interest to Western readers. Mr. Miura's collection of stories describes a shift in ethical tone, a... BENJAMIN LYTAL http://www.nysun.com/arts/sizing-up-the-short-story/67091/ Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Short story anthologies interest two classes of reader — he who wants to read a general survey, and he who wants to go over the table of contents with a fine-toothed comb. To the well-read, and perhaps small-minded, these anthologies are like betting sheets; they indicate who's in and who's out . In the many anthologies of the 1990s, star-editors assumed the curatorial role, and their personal authority made this game more interesting. In his best-of-the-century roundup, why did John Updike...