{"id":3928,"date":"2016-06-01T08:23:57","date_gmt":"2016-06-01T15:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/i81.a52.mywebsitetransfer.com\/?p=3928"},"modified":"2017-08-07T17:12:31","modified_gmt":"2017-08-08T00:12:31","slug":"latest-from-dactyl-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dactylfoundation.org\/?p=3928","title":{"rendered":"Latest from Dactyl Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"goingdark\"<\/a>Going Dark: Selected Stories by Dennis Must<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Posted on April 28, 2016<\/a> by Dactyl Review<\/a><\/div>\n
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As I read Going Dark, Selected Stories<\/em><\/a> by Dennis Must, (Coffeetown Press, 170 pages) I saw a realistic foundation in each story. Here is a recognizable world with real people suffering real-life anguish. What interested me, however, was the way the author then handled time, space, and imagination. To come to grips with it, I had to invent a literary term\u2014lyrical surrealism\u2014to distinguish Must\u2019s work from fantasy which, to my mind, means dragons and dragonspeak, time warps, elves and men with long beards carrying oaken staves and speaking some dialect of incomprehensible origin.<\/p>\n

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\"minimummaintenance\"<\/a>Minimum Maintenance by Carolyn Colburn<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Posted on April 21, 2016<\/a> by Dactyl Review<\/a><\/div>\n
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The protagonist and narrator in Minimum Maintenance<\/em> <\/a>(Bonnie\u2019s Mews Publications, 240 pages) by Carolyn Colburn is a thirteen-year old girl named Sugar, named so because her mother didn\u2019t want to say \u201cshit\u201d on camera. Sugar bumps along in the wake of her untethered mother from Minneapolis to Up North to Montana, Oklahoma, Nevada and parts in between, smoking cigarettes and joints, working on a tattoo and making fleeting friendships along the way. The title indicates the nature of Sugar\u2019s childhood along the back roads, where dead cars pile high and outliers hang onto reality for dear life, doing what they do with drugs, booze, guns, sex, and hair dye.<\/p>\n

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Posted in coming of age<\/a> | Tagged gritty literary fiction<\/a>, nonlinear narrative<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Conductor\"<\/a>The Conductor by Sarah Quigley<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Posted on April 16, 2016<\/a> by Dactyl Review<\/a><\/div>\n
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It is easy to understand how The Conductor<\/a><\/em> (Vintage, 303 pages) stayed on the best seller list for weeks and weeks in New Zealand. The story is compelling, and Sarah Quigley knows how to tell it. Against the background of the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War Dmitry Shostakovich is writing his Seventh Symphony, struggling to finish it while German bombs are falling all around him. Meanwhile, the main character, Karl Il\u2019ich Eliasberg (1907-1978), the second-rate conductor of a second-rate orchestra, goes about his life of quiet desperation, unaware that circumstances are coming together so as to place him at the center of history.<\/p>\n

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Posted in just literary fiction<\/a> | Tagged postmodern literary fiction<\/a>, realism in fiction<\/a><\/p>\n

L<\/a>\"loveandobstacles\"<\/a>ove and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Posted on April 15, 2016<\/a> by Dactyl Review<\/a><\/div>\n
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I\u2019ve read all of Aleksandar Hemon\u2019s books. They have been blurbed and reviewed by the most enthusiastic of blurbers and reviewers: \u201cdazzling, astonishingly creative prose\u201d with \u201cremarkable, haunting autobiographical elements.\u201d The latest Hemon offering, Love and Obstacles<\/em> <\/a>(Riverhead Books, 210 pages), is a series of short stories, most of which continue in Hemon\u2019s now familiar reminiscent strain. They amount to a kind of Bildungsroman, the story of a guy from Sarajevo who comes to America\u2014in a word, Hemon\u2019s own story, and therein lies the problem. Or, to put it more precisely, there may have been no problem when he started writing in this nostalgic, reminiscent vein, but by now the problem is obvious. What I\u2019m writing about below is, primarily, that problem.<\/p>\n

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Posted in just literary fiction<\/a> | Tagged innovative writing style<\/a>, striking metaphors<\/a> |<\/p>\n

\"betrayers\"<\/a><\/em>
\nThe Betrayers by David Bezmozgis<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Posted on April 10, 2016<\/a> by Dactyl Review<\/a><\/div>\n
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The Betrayers<\/a><\/em> (Little, Brown & Co, 267 pages) begins with a Russian expression on a young woman\u2019s face. A pretty blonde woman working as hotel clerk in Yalta is berated by a young woman from Israel, who insists she be given a room. The clerk \u201cendured the assault with a stiff, mulish expression. A particularly Russian sort of expression, Kotler thought. The morose, disdainful expression with which the Russians had greeted their various invaders. An expression that denoted an irrational, mortal refusal to capitulate\u2014the pride and bane of the Russian people.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Posted in just literary fiction<\/a> | Tagged character-driven story<\/a>, realism in fiction<\/a>, unassuming literary style<\/a> |<\/p>\n<\/div>\n