The Mumpsimus

This review was first published in the Fall 2019 issue of Rain Taxi Review of Books . Anne Boyer's The Undying  went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. (I have kept the page references in my text that are provided for the Rain Taxi copyeditors, but which are cut from the printed version.)  This review in many ways intersects with my later essays  on Zambreno's  Drifts and  Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts , parts of something I've been thinking of as "the asterisks project". What will come of it, I don't know, but it is ongoing, in fits and starts (more fits than starts these days, but c'est la vie). Screen Tests Kate Zambreno Harper Perennial ($16.99) The Undying Anne Boyer Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($26.00) reviewed by Matthew Cheney In Screen Tests , a collection of prose pieces, Kate Zambreno says that she writes to “announce to myself, as well as to the drifts of former intimates that amass into one giant coronary heartbreak, t...

This review was first published in the Fall 2018 issue of Rain Taxi Review of Books . (I have kept the page references in that are provided for the Rain Taxi copyeditors, but which are cut from the printed version.) At the end of December 1977, police arrived at the home of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Limuru, Kenya. He was sent to the Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison under a detention order signed by the Minister for Home Affairs, Daniel arap Moi. He had no right to a lawyer, there was no trial, there was no sentence. For two weeks, no-one outside the government and police forces, including his family, knew where he was, or even if he was still alive. (Later, family visits were occasionally permitted, but they were rare and extremely short.) He could be detained for a day or for the rest of his life, his access to any news of the outside world severely restricted, his recourse to anything resembling due process limited to brief appearances before biannual review tribunals that might as w...

The following two reviews first appeared in the Fall 2017 and Winter 2017/18 issues of Rain Taxi , respectively. I have grouped them together here because they quite coincidentally show two different approaches to modernist material: the academic approach of Little Magazine, World Form and the more general approach of The World Broke in Two . The reviews show the risks and benefits of such approaches. Putting the two together, I sound a bit like Goldilocks: the academic book is a little too academic, the general book is not academic enough. It's a difficult balance, I know. Little Magazine, World Form Eric Bulson Columbia University Press                                                In recent decades, the academic study of literary modernism has bro...

This review originally appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Rain Taxi . Allah Is Not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma translated by Frank Wynne Anchor Books First published in Paris in 2000 as Allah n'est pas obligé , and now arriving in the U.S. for the first time, Ahmadou Kourouma's final novel is the harrowing story of a child soldier in Côte d'Ivoire and Liberia in the 1990s.   It is a story of adult atrocities perceived (and committed) by a child, but ultimately it is something other than that, a fiction that shows how fiction can—and, perhaps, should—fall apart when asked to bear the weight of the real horrors of the world. Though his four novels are as yet almost unknown within the United States, Kourouma's reputation in France is strong, and he received various awards before his death in December 2003. Born in 1927 in Côte d'Ivoire, he spent time during his childhood in Guinea and Mali before going to France for school and later to Indochina as ...

This review appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of Rain Taxi . Upon the Altar of the Nation:  A Moral History of the Civil War by Harry S. Stout Viking Any history of the U.S. Civil War is a moral history, because the brutal events of the war have little meaning in and of themselves, and so historians must put forth interpretations and arguments about not only how, but why such blood was shed.  The paradox any historian must confront, though, is that the Civil War, while inevitably draped in moral evaluations, is rich with contradictions and complexities that render all moral judgment at best reductive and shallow. "Instead of declaring the Civil War a just war dictated by prudent considerations of proportionality and protection of noncombatants," Harry Stout writes, "I argue that in too many instances both sides descended into moral misconduct."  Though this is hardly a revolutionary thesis, Stout builds evidence for his argument with stubbornly repetit...

This review appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Rain Taxi . (I've left the page references in that RT uses for proofreading, as they may be useful to readers.) Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry by Reginald Shepherd University of Michigan Press It's not difficult to trace the source of all the magic in Reginald Shepherd's first collection of essays—the author's sensitivity to the fruitful borderlands between aesthetics and politics—but pinning down each wondrous effect emanating from that source might take a while.   This is a book rich with ideas and implications, a book that provokes and dazzles and sings. In the introduction to Orpheus in the Bronx , Shepherd calls himself "someone who has looked to art and literature as a means for the expansion rather than the constriction of horizons" (1), and that tendency and quest is evident on every page of every essay.   As a poet who is, among other thin...

This piece first appeared in the Winter 2015 print edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books . J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face-to-face with Time by David Attwell Viking ($27.95) The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction, and Psychotherapy by J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz Viking ($27.95) In 1977, J.M. Coetzee struggled while beginning the novel Waiting for the Barbarians , because, he wrote in his notebook, he had failed in “the creation of a credible beloved you .” David Attwell explains this mysterious statement as a manifestation of Coetzee’s disaffection with illusionary realism, the kind of writing that pretends textual figures are real. A week later, Coetzee wrote: “I have no interest in telling stories; it is the process of storytelling that interests me. This man MM, as a ‘he’ living in the world, bores me. ‘Creating’ an illusionistic reality in which he moves depresses me. Hence the exhausted quality of the writing.” Any fiction writer ...

Seeking something else, I came across this review I wrote in 2006 of Paris Press's editions of two books by the extraordinary Bryher. It was first published in the Fall 2006 issue of Rain Taxi . I don't think it's ever been put online, so I'm happy to release it into the wild here. (The quotation page numbers were included for copyediting and not in the published version, but I figure they might be useful, so I've kept them in. Also, for more samples from The Heart to Artemis , see this post .) Living in a Time of Transition: Two Books by Bryher by Matthew Cheney The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs Bryher Paris Press ($19.95) The Player’s Boy Bryher Paris Press ($15.00) "I found my study of history of great practical value," Bryher writes in The Heart to Artemis .   "It helped me to assess the future and to be aware of change."[118] Awareness of change runs through the veins of Bryher's body of work, an...

This review was first published in Rain Taxi in the spring of 2011 . I'd actually forgotten all about it, but then came across it as I was reorganizing some folders on my computer. In case it still holds some interest, here it is. (Page references are to the Yale hardcover, and were for the copyeditors to double check my quotes; they weren't in the print version of the review, but I've kept them in because, well, why not...) One of the pleasures of Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? is that it all but forces us — dares us, even — to argue with it.   Josipovici presents an idiosyncratic definition of Modernism, he perceives the struggles of Modernist writers and artists as fundamentally spiritual, and he frames it all by describing his disenchantment with most of the critically-lauded British fiction of the last few decades, a disenchantment that he ascribes to such fiction’s attachment to non-Modernist 19 th century desires. ...