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 21:45:00 +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.

Book Review: 'Where Tigers Are At Home'

Alan Cheuse — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 21:39:00 +0000

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

And I'm Audie Cornish. Our book reviewer, Alan Cheuse, has just traveled to Brazil and back in an 800-page novel. The book is called "Where Tigers Are At Home." It's by a French novelist named Jean-Marie Blas de Robles and it's just out in English. Here's Alan's review.

ALAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: A Frenchman named Von Wogau, a divorced and retired journalist, lives in a small town in the northeastern region of Brazil.

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.

Revisiting A Sad Yet Hopeful Winter's Tale In 'The Snow Child'

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 12:03:00 +0000

A sad tale's best for winter, as Shakespeare wrote.

A Wintry Mix: Alan Cheuse Selects The Season's Best

Alan Cheuse — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 12:00:00 +0000

It's that time of year again — the leaves have fallen, the dark comes early, the air brings with it a certain chill — and I've been piling up books on my reading table, books I've culled from the offerings of the past few months, which because of their essential lyric beauty and power stand as special gifts for you and yours.

They sometimes seem at odds, the lyrical impulse and the narrative impulse.

Munro Weighs The Twists And Turns Of This 'Dear Life'

Alan Cheuse — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:56:00 +0000

More than a dozen short-story collections since Canada's Alice Munro published her first book, and she now seems as much an institution as any living writer. We count on her for a particular variety of short story, the sort that gives us so much life within the bounds of a single tale that it nourishes us almost as much as a novel does.

The U.S. master of short fiction, Bernard Malamud, used to say that a short story predicates, that is, points us toward a life in all its fullness.

Comic Struggles Of A Frustrated Writer In 'Zoo Time'

Alan Cheuse — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 11:03:00 +0000

"My aim," writes English novelist Guy Ableman to his agent, "is to write a transgressive novel that explores the limits of the morally permissible in our times."

Sounds quite serious, even brow-wrinkling, doesn't it? A dangerous act of experimental writing, perhaps something Norman Mailer might have tried, or Henry Miller before him?

Except that Ableman — the narrator of Howard Jacobson's odd new work of fiction — sees the joke in it. "Who are the great blasphemers of our age?" he asks. "Not poets and writers ... My hero is a stand-up comedian.

'Round House' Is One Of Erdrich's Best

Alan Cheuse — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 11:03:00 +0000

I've devoted many hours in my life to reading, and among these hours many of them belong to the creations of novelist Louise Erdrich. In more than a dozen books of fiction — mostly novel length — that make up a large part of her already large body of work, Erdrich has given us a multitude of narrative voices and stories.

A Midcentury Romance, With 'Sunlight' And 'Shadow'

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 20:16:00 +0000

New York, New York, it's a wonderful town! And Mark Helprin's new near-epic novel makes it all the more marvelous. It's got great polarized motifs — war and peace, heroism and cowardice, crime and civility, pleasure and business, love and hate, bias and acceptance — which the gifted novelist weaves into a grand, old-fashioned romance, a New York love story that begins with a Hollywoodish meet-cute on the Staten Island Ferry.

"To be in New York on a beautiful day is to feel razor-close to being in love," Helprin writes.

A Leap Of The Imagination Across The 'River Of Bees'

Alan Cheuse — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 11:03:00 +0000

Ursula Le Guin comes immediately to mind when you turn the pages of Kij Johnson's first book of short stories, her debut collection is that impressive.

'The People Of Forever' Are Frank But Flawed

Alan Cheuse — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 11:03:00 +0000

Nothing like a novel by a young recruit to tell you the truths about an army, as in, say, From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead. In this case it's a book called The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, by Shani Boianjiu, a young female veteran of the Israel Defense Forces.

Book Review: 'God Carlos'

Alan Cheuse — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 21:36:00 +0000

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

And I'm Melissa Block. Now to the 16th Century and the Spanish port of Cadiz. It's the setting for "God Carlos," a new novel by Jamaican-born writer Anthony Winkler, who takes us on a voyage to the New World.

Experimental Fiction At Its Finest — And Funniest

Alan Cheuse — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 11:18:00 +0000

Experimental fiction in North America began with a genius of a doyen in Paris: Gertrude Stein, whose aesthetic assertion that writers shape and form and reform the medium of language the way sculptors work with stone, painters work with light and shape and composers work with sound, changed Hemingway forever and, thus, changed the nature of the American short story — or the American art story, at least.

So much for the Irish storywriter Frank O'Connor's waggish remark — leading from the strength of his strong realist tendencies — that experimental writing is "what looks funny on the page." O