Bradley Gorski on Andrei Bitov's The Symmetry Teacher:
If the premise sounds like John Barth circa 1982, it’s no accident. The borrowed frame both signals a debt to the West and opens the floodgates to Western images. Bitov’s book becomes something of a paean to global postmodernism, an unabashed imitation that gleefully plunders predecessors, with overt borrowings from Borges and Barth, John Fowles and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as from the early Andrei Bitov, himself a pioneer of Russian postmodernism.
John Clute on Michael Faber's The Book of Strange New Things:
And the story ends, where it had to from the beginning. The Word of God, in the mouth of a caring Christian, is a betrayal. The good caring Christian, having intolerably deepened the stress of his flock, begins his journey back to a world his religion cannot address: as there is no flock left for him there to comfort with saltatory tales to dodge the End with. On planet Earth in this century, the words that Peter still longs to utter into Bea's ear have become wind. Battered in the irrevocable sadness of The Book of Strange New Things, the reader does not look for him to find her, does not really wish him success in his quest to redeem with his comforting male presence those he had abandoned. The reader looks for him to stop breathing twelve-steps into every ear.
Jeff Bursey on John Domini's The Sea-God's Herb:
His persistence, and success, in promoting what might be called experimental or offbeat works depends, in large part, on the ability to reach back or out to some antecedent work or literary ancestor to shore up his case. The learning is worn lightly. Another sizeable part of Domini’s appeal rests on style. While often plainspoken, there are the occasional fireworks and the intense involvement in the text under discussion.
Comments