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Wednesday reviews roundup for 1st July
Posted by Paul Raven on July 1st, 2009 at 18:58
Hey there – enjoying the weather? I certainly have been… but there’s work to be done as well! So, let’s take a look in the reviews in-tray.
First up, Karen Burnham at SF Signal struggles with Zoran Živković‘s The Bridge, despite having enjoyed some of his other titles:
I’ve never had this problem with Živković stories before. I absolutely loved the other books of his I’ve read; The Book, The Writercontains a story that every reader should read, while The Last Book was just allusive enough to make me feel smugly educated while still entertaining with an enjoyable genre plot. However, stories like those in The Bridge just aren’t my cup of tea. I almost certainly apply the wrong ‘reading protocols’ to books like this–I want them to resolve into a world-picture that makes sense, like fantastic and science fictional worlds do. I’ve never been a fan of Kafka, particularly not his novels (I have appreciated some of his short fiction). I prefer to have at least some guidance or entry point from the author as to how they intend a piece to be read. In short, stories like this make me feel like an idiot, like I’m missing something that if only I were smarter and more sophisticated would be obvious. (Although I’m confident enough now as a reader to suspect that isn’t so.) However, if you enjoy this kind of literary ambiguity, the sort of story that allows more or less infinite interpretations, this is a short and well written example of the form.
Well, you can’t please everyone all the time! The good Mr Živković is a singular writer, that’s for sure – but he’s a very skilled one, too. Maybe you’ll luxuriate where Karen lost interest?
Continuing the recent flurry of unlinkable but prestigious print reviews, Bev Vincent takes on Joe Hill‘s long-since-sold-out novella for Dead Reckonings and finds Gunpowder to be a fine story, though she holds it’s not truly science fictional:
Gunpowder is a work of rich imagination. The relationship among the boys, and their individual characters, are well developed and ring true. Once the repercussions of the threat of war infiltrate their insular world, the pace picks up rapidly, and many of the things the boys have created come into play in ways Elaine could never have imagined.
Meanwhile, Locus Magazine reviewer Faren Miller finds much to love about The Painting And The City by our very own Robert Freeman Wexler:
Leaving epic realms for something like the brink of our current hard times in the contemporary US, Robert Freeman Wexler’s The Painting and the City uses a work of art from the 1840s as a modern New Yorker’s mysterious path back to a Manhattan Island both earlier and different from the one we know. From the moment he first sees it at a friend’s home, sculptor/art teacher Jacob Lerner is obsessed by its lovely ‘‘Madame Burgundy,’’ the sinister man who seems poised to do her harm, and the artist himself – an obscure Dutch-English fellow called Philip Schuyler.
A description of Lerner’s own methods might equally suit Wexler’s prose, though it ends with a wry aside. His work ‘‘depended on being able to transport the viewer outside their conscious, rational self’’ and ‘‘didn’t fit into a category that could be reduced to a blurb. So he produced it. Produce instead of reduce, he said, until his friends tired of hearing it.’’
[...]
The Painting and the City explores the artistic/writerly temperament even as it moves deeper into the fantastic of both the 1840s and a 21st century that has nearly reached our current age of ruined greed and glorified Green. [...] But there’s more to this than satire, for Wexler also gives his modern protagonist an ability to move through time and among many worlds – portrayed with a genuine sense of wonder, as well as the grotesque.
You can’t ask for much more than that!
As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!