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The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind by Billy O\u2019Callaghan<\/a><\/p>\n Posted on\u00a0October 10, 2016<\/a> by\u00a0Dactyl Review<\/a><\/p>\n What to say about\u00a0Things we Lose<\/em> (New Island Press, 228 pages) a book that stunned me, time and again. I might call Billy O\u2019Callaghan a \u201cwriter\u2019s writer,\u201d if that term did not immediately consign a writer to obscurity. (In the USA, Richard Yates is often referred to as a \u201cwriter\u2019s writer,\u201d and until the movie\u00a0Revolutionary Road<\/em>, few people, apart from those who taught in MFA programs, knew his name.)<\/p>\n I would like to invent a new way to describe what I think Billy O\u2019Callaghan will leave as his literary legacy. I would call him a \u201chuman\u2019s human\u201d (with a pen) or an \u201cexplorer\u2019s explorer\u201d of our dreams. I would call him a poet of the spirit. Or, maybe, to use a more prosaic analogy, he is a housekeeper who assiduously dusts the cluttered rooms we keep closed, even from our conscious minds.\u00a0Continue reading\u00a0\u2192<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n The Tiger\u2019s Wife by T\u00e9a\u00a0Obreht<\/a><\/p>\n Posted on\u00a0August 1, 2016<\/a> by\u00a0U.R. Bowie<\/a><\/p>\n Like many who have read this first novel, written by a young woman still in her twenties, I marvel at the very existence of the\u00a0The Tiger\u2019s Wife<\/em> (Random House, 338 pages).<\/p>\n How could someone this young have written a narrative this complicated, this full of insights into human nature, this teeming with art\u2014this GOOD? I have read several reviews of the book online and I marvel once again at the caviling, the failure to appreciate the book on the part of some reviewers. Have American readers become so inured to the genre of \u201cdomestic literary realism,\u201d this dull, insipid stuff that dominates the publishing world these days\u2014stories of ordinary Americans doing ordinary things, told, for the most part, in flat ordinary language\u2014that they fail to appreciate something with genuine verve and brilliance?\u00a0Continue reading\u00a0\u2192<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Leo Tolstoy\u2019s Anna Karenina, translated by Miriam\u00a0Schwartz<\/a><\/p>\n Posted on\u00a0July 25, 2016<\/a> by\u00a0U.R. Bowie<\/a><\/p>\n So here we have one more translation into English of\u00a0Anna Karenina<\/em> (Yale University Press, 754 pages) the greatest novel ever written in the history of world literature (my opinion, but not only mine). The publicity announcements and blurbs make big claims for this book. Marian Schwartz, a renowned translator with extensive experience, \u201cembraces Tolstoy\u2019s unusual style\u2014she is the first English language translator ever to do so.\u201d Hmm. \u201cClearly a labor of love\u2014over a decade in the making\u2014this translation is the most accurate Tolstoy we have in English.\u201d Hmm. Marian Schwartz \u201cbequeaths us not a translation at all but Tolstoy\u2019s English original.\u201d Huh?<\/p>\n Such grandiose blurbery places quite a burden on the shoulders of the translated text. Let\u2019s see if the text can bear such a heavy weight.\u00a0Continue reading\u00a0\u2192<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Road by Cormac\u00a0McCarthy<\/a><\/p>\n Posted on\u00a0July 20, 2016<\/a> by\u00a0U.R. Bowie<\/a><\/p>\n I\u2019m ten years late getting around to reading\u00a0The Road<\/em> (Alfred A. Knopf, 287 pages), but since it has to rank among the most powerful pieces of American fiction written in the past ten years, it remains more than worthy of discussion.<\/p>\n McCarthy here tells a tale of \u201cnights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.\u201d We\u2019re in the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction. Bad times have descended upon the U.S. and the whole world, consequent upon some enormous Catastrophe. We are never told what happened\u2014it could have been a nuclear war\u2014but one thing is obvious: something really big has blown, leaving ash all over the earth and floating through the air. Apparently most animals are extinct, and the few human beings who survive face fellow humans who are, largely, living beastly lives.\u00a0Continue reading\u00a0\u2192<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Making of Zombie Wars by Aleksandar\u00a0Hemon<\/a><\/p>\n Posted on\u00a0July 17, 2016<\/a> by\u00a0U.R. Bowie<\/a><\/p>\n A literary truism: good comic writing, any comic writing that professes to call itself literary fiction, must be undergirded with a firm foundation in seriousness. Nikolai Gogol was\/is the greatest comic writer in Russian literature; his works are profound. Vladimir Nabokov wrote the following about Gogol\u2019s long story, \u201cThe Overcoat,\u201d widely considered the best story ever written in Russia: \u201cThe diver, the seeker for pearls, the man who prefers the monsters of the deep to the sunshades on the beach, will find in \u2018The Overcoat\u2019 shadows linking our state of existence to those other states and modes which we dimly apprehend in our rare moments of irrational perception.\u201d<\/p>\n Too many contemporary American writers of literary fiction are under those umbrellas on the beach. If they are swimming at all they are swimming in the shallows. There are depths to be plumbed through the art of writing creative fiction. Why not plumb them? Is it too risky? Is it easier to wade into tepid waters and potter around there? Time to take a deep breath and dive down deep now, modern American author. Time to stop your \u201cshit-swimming\u201d (Hemon\u2019s term, taken out of context) in the literary shallows.<\/p>\n The Making of Zombie Wars<\/em> (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 307 pages) begins with Hollywood silliness\u2014amateur screenwriters pitching ideas to one another in a Chicago workshop\u2014the idiocy and mindlessness of Hollywood (and of the whole U.S. A.), lurks in the background all the way through to the end. Practically all of Hemon\u2019s books with American characters in a U.S. setting present a picture of our country teeming with idiots. This novel is set in 2003, just as we were embarking on what will surely go down as one of the most idiotic foreign-policy decisions of the twenty-first century: the invasion of Iraq.\u00a0Continue reading\u00a0\u2192<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n![\"tigerswife\"](\"https:\/\/dactylreview.files.wordpress.com\/2016\/08\/tigerswife.jpg?w=99&h=150\")
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