Alan Cheuse

How To Put This 'Delicate'-ly ... Not Le Carre's Best Work

Alan Cheuse — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:03:00 +0000

Some novelists interest us because they turn the light of a style we enjoy on whatever subject they take up. Some novelists we enjoy because they have found a great subject and work it well and lovingly. John le Carre seems to belong to the latter group, having found his vein of fiction gold in the world of Cold War espionage.

Book Review: 'A Nearly Perfect Copy'

Alan Cheuse — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:23:00 +0000

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Allison Amend is out with her third book. It's a novel called "A Nearly Perfect Copy." It features richly detailed characters, including an art dealer gone bad, and it's set in both Paris and New York. Our review Alan Cheuse found it all quite delectable.

ALAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: Elmira, known as Elm Howells, works her expertise mainly about European drawings and paintings at a family art auction house in Manhattan.

Real Writing, Real Life In Salter's 'All That Is'

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:03:00 +0000

"There comes a time," James Salter writes in the epigraph for his new novel, All That Is, "when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real."

There's an echo here of the great 17th-century Spanish playwright Calderon de la Barca's famous lines, "Life is a dream, and dreams even are dreams." In Calderon's play, the king who utters those lines defers only to God as the source of truth in human reality. Salter, like most of us modern writers, looks only to art.

Tigers, Scholars And Smugglers, All 'At Home' In Sprawling Novel

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:03:00 +0000

It's difficult to predict the reception Where Tigers Are at Home will receive in the United States. The winner of France's Prix Medicis in 2008, this big, sprawling novel (in a translation by Mike Mitchell) comes to us from Algerian-born writer, philosopher and world traveler Jean-Marie Blas de Robles, author of more than a dozen works of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. This book — the first of his to appear in the U.S. in English — stands as a challenge to readers who want their fiction to offer a quick pay-off.

Hamid's How-To for Success, 'Filthy Rich' In Irony

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:03:00 +0000

Novelist Mohsin Hamid lives in Lahore, Pakistan, quite some distance from the Long Island of Jay Gatsby. But his new novel — his third and, I think, best so far — reminded me of F. Scott Fitzgerald's quintessential American work. As I read this novel about the dark and light of success in a world of social instability, I kept asking myself how much I might be inflating the value of Hamid's novel by rating it so highly.

Lost In Everett's Hall Of Metafictional Mirrors

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 12:03:00 +0000

A friend of mine, with more than half a lifetime in the business of writing and a following of devoted fans, some years ago nailed a sign on the wall above his writing desk.

TELL THE [Expletive] STORY!

How I wish Percival Everett looked up every now and then from his keyboard to see a sign like this.

Everett is one of the most gifted and versatile of contemporary writers, with over 20 works of fiction to his name, novels and stories that show us our own country at an angle just slightly tilted toward the antic.

Brutality, Balkan Style In A Satiric 'Stone City'

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 12:03:00 +0000

From Swift to Orwell, political satire has played a major role in the history of European fiction. Much of it takes on an allegorical cast, but not all. The Fall of the Stone City, an incisive, biting work by Ismail Kadare — one of Europe's reigning fiction masters — refines our understanding of satire's nature. Kadare's instructive and delightful book takes us from the 1943 Nazi occupation of a provincial Albanian town, the ancient stone city of Gjirokaster, to the consolidation of communist rule there a decade later.

Under Ogawa's Macabre, Metafictional Spell

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 12:03:00 +0000

It used to be a truism among critics of British poetry that Keats and most of his fellow Romantic poets worked in the shadow of John Milton. I'm not making a perfect analogy when I suggest that most contemporary Japanese writers seem to be working under the shadow of Haruki Murakami, but I hope it highlights the spirit of the situation.

You certainly get that feeling of being haunted by Murakami when you begin reading the "Eleven Dark Tales," as she calls them, in this story cycle by Yoko Ogawa. The situations seem made for Murakami's particular blend of the real and the fantastic.

Evan S. Connell: A Master Of Fact And Fiction

Alan Cheuse — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 12:03:00 +0000

Mrs. Bridge and Gen. Custer: one an invented character, the other a historical figure. You know their names, you can see their faces, even hear their voices as they move across the landscapes in your mind. One in a dining room, in a house in a Kansas City neighborhood, the other riding across the rolling plains of Montana. Mrs. India Bridge and Gen. Custer are some of the most memorable creations of Evan S. Connell, who died this week at the age of 88.

Harrison's New Novellas Present Men In Full

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 12:03:00 +0000

Two years have gone by since I first suggested to President Obama that he create a new Cabinet post, and appoint distinguished fiction writer Jim Harrison as secretary for quality of life.