The Call
by Yannick Murphy
Harper Perennial, 2011
240 pages / $14.99 Buy from Harper Perennial
Rating: 9.0

 
I picked this book off the shelf at the closing Borders based entirely on Yannick Murphy’s name, having been familiar with previous books, particularly Stories in Another Language, one of the Knopf titles under Lish. I decided to buy the book immediately after opening the book to its first page, and finding there the manner of deployment of information that appeared:

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In the Devil’s Territory
by Kyle Minor
Dzanc Books, 2008
220 pages / $16.95 Buy from Dzanc Books
Rating: 6.5

With In the Devil’s Territory, Minor writes primary characters who are to a one religious, but none who testify to supernatural events and miracles in their own lives, in part (it seems) to depict certain of them as areas of as much suffering as anywhere else, and where the traditional Christian lifeline, perceivable congress with God, has been cut and redirected through churches and church schools. He favors a multi-part story that shifts between perspectives to attempt “real story” triangulation (“A Day Meant to Do Less” and the title story). Characters each see a small part of a larger story, and the coordinates to which their narratives point is where the reader gains understanding they lack. Minor has a mind for simple, effective arrangements, which occasionally require narrational contortions to suit.

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Between Parentheses
by Roberto Bolaño
New Directions, 2011
352 pages / $24.95 Buy from Powell’s
Rating: 9.0

“Reading, said Gil de Biedma, is more natural than writing. I would add (redundancy aside) that it’s also much healthier, no matter what ophthalmologists say. In fact, literature is a long struggle from redundancy to redundancy, until the final redundancy.”

– Roberto Bolaño
Between Parentheses

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The Sextine Chapel
by Hervé Le Tellier
Dalkey Archive Press, 2011
104 pages / $14.95 Buy from Dalkey Archive Press
Rating: 7.0

The Sextine Chapel, a book about the sexual interlocutions of 13 males and 13 females, stands upon the mathematical bedrock of Oulipo. The algorithm: (A)nna has sex with (B)en who has sex with (C)hloe who has sex with (D)ennis all the way until (Z)ach has sex with (A)nna who then skips six letters to (H)arry who skips another six to (O)riane and so on until, in close, (P)hilippe is having sex with (A)nna finishing the corporal turntable. Each hook-up is a paragraph on a page. Not everyone has sex with everyone else, but sayings are passed and settings repeated, creating a finite kaleidoscope of vagina and penis inside of which these strangers are connected.

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The Bee-Loud Glade
by Steve Himmer
Atticus Books, 2011
224 pages / $14.95 Buy from Atticus Books
Rating: 5.0

I wish I had read The Bee-Loud Glade with fewer expectations, though that may have been impossible after examining its exterior. The title is from Yeats (“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”) and the front cover features a slightly altered version of Magritte’s “The False Mirror.” One blurb employs the phrase “postmodern complexity.” Another describes the novel as “Thoreau meets Ballard meets Huysmans and many more.” Thoreau was a hermit for some time, and The Bee-Loud Glade does feature a hermit.

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Gender City
by Lisa Samuels
Shearsman Books Ltd, 2011
114 pages / $16.00 Buy from Shearsman Books
Rating: 0.0

The epigraph(s?) of Gender City condenses what would be the otherwise unacknowledged or scattered cathectic charges of pavilions in a blank and anti-readerly moment as esoterically alarming as the discovery of age-weighted shelving practices, while utilizing the stylistic succor of regulative coolant (the wonderful Lisa Robertson) and aspirant fantasticality (New Zealand at Shanghai World Expo 2010). Spectrally efficient, these two quotes effect mutation and prove temporarily problematic: by brushing the bounds of a credible tele-cocoon with you, the writing soon coaxes out resentment for the rhetorical transposition in section one, that is, demoing a contrasting reader task, and projecting this actual loneliness backwards. This is not a question of inelegance, but a question, for me, of palling around with dissatisfaction beyond an intimacy that was never anything but that, a serif font that does the one like an I [“Homosocial fugue”], the first of nine content markers marking content that does not.

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I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur
by Mathias Svalina
Mud Luscious Press, 2011
67 pages / $12.00 Buy from Mud Luscious Press
Rating: 8.0

Mathias Svalina’s I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur has a very simple conceit: in a series of vignettes, an entrepreneur describes the outlandish businesses he’s started, and, occasionally, their reasons for not working. Thus, we learn of enterprises to turn everything into gold, to put blond hairs on the pillows of single men, to allow children to remain children forever, to retrofit memories with pilot lights and to slip old notes inside of used books by invisible employees.

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I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur
by Mathias Svalina
Mud Luscious Press, 2011
67 pages / $12.00 Buy from Mud Luscious Press
Rating: 8.7

When I received Mathias Svalina’s novella, I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur in the mail, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I tore open the padded manila envelope and found myself staring at a green and orange cover with the words “a novel(la)” printed on it. Ok. Then I did a preliminary flip through of the book and didn’t see a novella at all. The book seemed to be filled with short poems, prose poems and pieces of what some would call flash fiction. Ok. I was hoping the book wasn’t going to be some failed attempt at “experimental fiction.” But, coming from Mud Luscious Press, I wasn’t exactly surprised that this book was, at first impression, well, weird. J.A. Tyler and his Mud Luscious Press have been putting lovely oddities into the world for a few years now, and I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur stayed the Mud Luscious Press course, and did not disappoint.

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Helsinki
by Peter Richards
Action Books, 2011
90 pages / $16.00 Buy from Action Books
Rating: 8.0

The interlocking poems of Peter Richard’s Helsinki pleasure the reader by taking a deviated, scenic route, rather than getting straight to the point. Disregarding individual poem titles and punctuation (except for apostrophes), the poems become a labyrinth — ritually switching subject matters, physical settings and places in time. There’s even an element of multiplicity with the speaker, undertaking different roles across the terrain of the book: a lover, a solider, etc:

“We each appear indelible visible / precisely as ourselves but in the way / letters in a name might come oddly assorted I never fully wore the skin / of my name as when seeing my name / pass in that way forever staring down …”

With reckless line breaks, unyielding sentences, and a lack of punctuation to serve as a guide for how to read and when to stop and take a breath, there are moments in Helsinki where the poems can be difficult, seemingly almost inaccessible. This isn’t an easy book; this shouldn’t deter readers, though. Richards is a talented writer: with an affinity for gnarly diction, he is able to aptly and swiftly go from one off-the-wall surreal scene to another within a few lines in a poem:

“My tube was never removed so this painting depicts / the continuation of sound passing through one boundary / wall to the next on and out into space where I still have / a more or less decent view of the villa though it looks small”

Memory and recollection are thematically crucial as well. The speaker (or perhaps speakers?) is unsure where to the draw line differentiating between a past memory, a dream, and something this present sense of the world: “When I came to it was a place impossible / to distinguish from the place in my sleep.” And perhaps that’s the most attractive element of the book: being thrown into an unstable literary landscape that undergoes constant metamorphosis. Helsinki is dynamic. It’s an “endless architecture,” one that spirals and swirls into many places, trying to accomplish a difficult task for itself:

“woe to be counted when a mountain with so many / unburdens itself hearing cries from the buried ones / failing inside a mouth clogged with it recalls my own / failure to ever capture in words the whitened season”

Day for Night
by Frederick Reiken
Reagan Arthur Books, 2010
352 pages / $14.99 Buy from Powell’s
Rating: 7.0

It may be argued that a linked set of stories, or story cycle, presented under the unifying banner of a novel, hews closer to the truth of that nature which art seeks to replicate, than the more traditional novel form could achieve. The set of linked stories paints a broader portrait of its subject, in all the disjointedness of the life its mirrored surface reflects. Or so one would hope, when making the argument. Otherwise, why bother to call it a novel at all? Why not just publish a set of stories as stories, as so many others have done, and allow the reader to discover the connections for himself? Ignoring, or course, the disparity in demand for novels versus story collections.

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