Michael Orthofer’s The Complete Review, “a selectively comprehensive, objectively opinionated survey of books old and new,” is an increasingly rare example of meat over garnish in the Internet’s menu of websites. It doesn’t have a review for every serious work of literature of the last forty-plus years, but it has more reviews than any other single site and covers a wider range of the world than most. Michael generously agreed to let me collect the top-rated wafer-thin novels reviewed on his site, along with their grades and an excerpt from each review. There is a terrific variety to choose from here.
Bear, Marian Engel (122 pages)
A : lovely, well-balanced work
“Bear is essentially a (transforming) summer-in-the-life novel. Canadian librarian Lou works at the Historical Institute, and when the legal wranglings about the disposition of an estate are finally over she is charged with assessing what exactly the Institute has inherited, and how it might be utilized. A Colonel Jocelyn Cary had left an estate, Pennarth, on Cary’s Island, to the Institute, and it was said to contain: ‘a large library of materials relevant to early settlement in the area’….
“It is, to put it simply, a summer of self-discovery for Lou, and she departs as a changed and more fully fledged person; she grows, as a woman and an individual. And Engel’s art is in the simple description that proves to have great depth, beautifully balanced between the mundane and naturalistic, and the (always believable) unusual.”
The Death of the Author by Gilbert Adair (135 pages)
A : an elegant little literary tale, superbly rendered.
“The Death of the Author is an exceptionally fine little novella. It is the story of Léopold Sfax, a Frenchman who came of age during World War II, emigrated to the United States, and rose through the ranks of academia to a professorship at an Ivy League institution in New Harbour (read New Haven). A literary scholar, he writes two enormously influential tomes, Either/Either and The Vicious Spiral. The latter makes him “by far the most celebrated critic in the United States.” In it he proposes and propounds what becomes known simply as “the Theory,” an ominous (and now all too familiar) literary fad of recent times. The main point: “so it was, with the advent of the Theory, that the Author was to find Himself declared well and truly dead.” The text exists beyond the author, the author is irrelevant.”
Double Indemnity by James M. Cain (125 pages)
A : clever, fast, sharp“
Double Indemnity is an impressive novel. It doesn’t have the heat of The Postman always Rings Twice, but, except for super-evil Phyllis, is largely more believable. The dialogue, especially, is excellent: clipped screenplay word-bites, with not a thing too much said. It’s a compelling story, and though very dark (there are almost no good guys here) is still very enjoyable.”
Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires by Julio Cortázar, translated by David Kurnick (87 pages)
A : brilliant small piece of meta-literary political fiction
“Cortázar was given [a Fantomas] comic by a friend, and inspired to write this short novel, integrating the comic-story into his own (as several pages and panels from the comic are used as illustrations — and, indeed, part of the story — in Cortázar’s novel). Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires finds ‘the narrator’ (as Cortázar consistently refers to himself — he doesn’t present the story in the first person) picking up a copy of the comic at a newsstand as he rushes to catch the train back to Paris from Brussels, where he had been participating in the 1975 Second Russell Tribunal, on Repression in Brazil, Chile, and Latin America (the book includes an Appendix with the Tribunal-findings.)”
The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom, translated by Ina Rilke (115 pages)
A
: a clever and very entertaining story.
“Herman Mussert, the narrator of this story, wakes up one morning and finds himself in a hotel room in Lisbon. An inexplicable occurrence, since he went to bed the night before at home, in Amsterdam. The hotel room is, however, familiar: Mussert had been there twenty years earlier. It was the scene of a defining moment in his life: he had slept with the wife of a friend there.
However one wishes to interpret it it is a fascinating read, very well-told and with a very human touch to it. (In contrast to some of Nooteboom’s other works, which might seem too coldly intellectual).”
Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano, translated by Barbara Wright (120 pages)
A : beautifully haunting and haunted
“Honeymoon begins with an almost noir feel with its elements of mysterious suicide and a man who wants to disappear, but it turns into something rather different, an affecting story of a very different sort, artfully unfolded by Modiano. Beautifully told — and retold, in Barbara Wright’s translation –, too, Honeymoon is an exceptional work.”
In the Dutch Mountains by Cees Nooteboom, translated by Adrienne Dixon (128 pages)
A : a clever, well-told story about — among other things — story-telling
“In the Dutch Mountains is a story within a story — and a story about writing a story. Alfonso Tiburón de Mendoza is Inspector of Roads in Zaragoza. In his youth he spent some years studying in the Netherlands — a country that resembles the Netherlands we are familiar with, but also differs from it in significant ways.
“Every August Tiburón goes to an empty schoolroom, gets behind one of the undersized desks, and writes. He is not a particularly successful author, not selling many copies of his books or achieving great renown, but he feels compelled to write, and he enjoys it.”
Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész, translated by Tim Wilkinson (120 pages)
A : powerful book of mourning
“Kaddish for an Unborn Child is the story of a middle-aged man with both real and literary experience: a writer and translator, his life-work the transformation of fiction, and of experience into fiction…. Like a Bernhard novel, Kaddish for an Unborn Child is a novel of repetition and ambiguity, the narrator acknowledging all his uncertainty, and constantly reminding the reader of the difficulty of exact expression.”
La Femme de Gilles by Madeleine Bourdouxhe, translated by Faith Evans (129 pages)
A : beautifully done
“Bourdouxhe’s writing — seemingly so simple and straightforward, and yet subtly pulling off a variety of narrative tricks; seemingly matter-of-fact and neutral, or often even warm, yet the underlying situations so awful — impresses throughout. La Femme de Gilles is an exceptional little novel.”
The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei, translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich (152 pages)
A : a very good, multi-layered story, exceptionally well-told
“The Membranes is an exceptionally well-conceived and turned science fiction story. Deceptively simple-looking on the surface, it is a truly impressive piece of work.”
Rituals by Cees Nooteboom, translated by Adrienne Dixon (147 pages)
A : an excellent, thoughtful, touching novel
“Cees Nooteboom’s short novel is an excellent little work that is essentially about three suicides….
Nooteboom tells the story very well as these three men look for their place in the world. He avoids the trap of idealization of the East, managing to pull off a green-tea ceremony and a few descriptions of yoga without sounding ridiculous or pompous, with Inni providing that proper skeptical point of view.”
Shyness and Dignity by Dag Solstad, translated by Sverre Lyngstad (150 pages)
A: powerful small day in/and a life novel
“Shyness and Dignity focusses intently on Elias Rukla, an Oslo schoolteacher in his early fifties. The story begins on a Monday in October, with his domestic morning routine, the reader warned but Rukla himself: ‘not yet knowing as he sat at the breakfast table with a light headache that it would be the decisive day in his life.'”
Strange Tale of Panorama Island by Edogawa Ranpo, translated by Elaine Kazu Gerbert (121 pages)
A : beautifully fantastical
“Strange Tale of Panorama Island is a strange little novel. Poe-influenced, the story is repeatedly pulled and pushed back into the constraints of a mystery-story — complete with a conclusion that has a detective-stand-in who confronts the protagonist and reveals how he determined his guilt — but also escapes these (and most other curbs) in its wild and wonderful fantasy (including, very satisfyingly, in its striking, shocking final scene).”
Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba, translated by Lisa Dillman (105 pages)
A : near-perfect childhood tale
“Such Small Hands is a short three-part novel(la). It begins with the aftermath of a horrific car accident: seven-year-old Marina survives, badly injured, but — as she then often recites, in brief summary of her collapsed world –: ‘My father died instantly, my mother in the hospital.’
“… Marina is taken to an orphanage — which doesn’t come with the usual bleak connotations, and is pretty and even fairly welcoming. For the girls there, it is an idyll — knowing no other, it is their universe, and they are happily adapted to it. Marina is an outsider — and remains outsider, among other reasons because of her memories of events and places outside this so narrowly circumscribed girl-world.”
Welcome to America by Linda Boström Knausgård, translated by Martin Aitken (124 pages)
A : an exceptionally accomplished work
“This is beautifully, disturbingly evocative work of fiction, a journey through a child’s mind and eyes of trying to handle and make some order of complex emotional states and varieties of experience, the lens not so much foggy as cautious, a juggling of memories and thoughts and experiences, and an attempt to find and maintain at least a semblance of control over the world around this child verging on but oh so wary of adulthood. If perhaps overly and too readily reliant on mental instability — as cause, explanation, and fear — Welcome to America is nevertheless an exceptionally accomplished work.”
