Matt Pincus

[REVIEW] Everybody Suffers: The Selected Poems of Juan Garcia Madero, Translated by Matt Longabucco

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suffers

O’Clock Press

52 pages, $12

 

Review by Matt Pincus

 

Juan Garcia Madero, the supposed writer of the poems in Everybody Suffers is the protagonist of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. He is an observer and student of the leaders of the visceral realist poetry movement, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. One knows Madero writes poems, which are never seen in Bolano’s text, thus giving Longabucco the impetus to posit himself as a fictional scholar and translator.

Everybody Suffers carries elements of imagist poetry from H.D. and Pound that mince with transgression, political rebellion, and hint at an echo, or reverie from French Symbolists haunting the text. Also, Longabucco’s speakers use Bolano’s fictional elements and themes in poems such as “Age of Enlightenment,” which draws directly from the corrupt policemen in 2666 who are complicit in the murders of young women around the town of Santa Teresa. Longabucco, as a fictional translator of a fictional character’s poetry, shows the government’s complicity in corrupt drug cartels, something more present now than ever after 43 students went missing in Iguala, Mexico two months ago:

and then destroyed the hands with acid
and then tore up the autopsy report
and then cremated the body and the prints
and threw all the ashes in the ashcan
and then buried the ashcan in a desert
not on earth.

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Books We Can’t Quit: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer

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2666

Angrama Press (2004)/ Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (2008)

 

Review by Matt Pincus

 

2666, Bolaño’s last novel, which could easily be seen as five interconnected novels, is a literary classic in a young century. It is extremely rare for a Latin American – or any international author – to be translated into English, published and distributed by a major house like FSG. The almost nine hundred pages are well worth a reader’s time, as the narrator takes an underlying lucidness to the prose that builds on itself through plot inconsistencies. Bolaño knows our genre expectations as reader, and carries one on those expectations, only to continually create gaps where a “fiction-making system” is created, as translator and scholar Chris Andrews says. 2666 opens old wounds of history in the land, and exposes the trauma of a community governed by evil.

The text is separated into five parts, and each of these sections has a separate genre: academic satire, thriller, detective fiction, beat novel, and historical romance. They all center on the town of Santa Teresa, a fictional border-city in Mexico, much like Ciudad Juárez. The academics come to the city to find Benno Von Archimboldi, the writer, who is nowhere to be found. Amalfitano, a professor at the university, is hanging geometric figures on his clothesline, delving into philosophical digressions as his daughter goes in and out of the house. Fate is an African American reporter from New York sent for an article about a boxing match when he starts to learn about the murders of women in the city. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Unchecked Savagery by Glenn Shaheen

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savagery

Ricochet Editions

76 pages, $10.00

 

Review by Matt Pincus

 

Glenn Shaheen’s collection of flash fiction is a bitter, sardonic reminder of America’s abstract fears and paranoia of “other.” The stories are distinctly American through cultural tropes (in the first story, “Harry Loves Every Movie,” Crash, Hostel 2 and Failure to Launch are mentioned): Movies, songs, brand name stores, corporate gimmicks and overly dramatized clichés become patterned, dry jokes on tragic ironies in American personas.

The story “Personal Order” takes on the corporate marketing of deodorant, and distorts what is usually a pleasant aroma into the smell of McDonald’s grease. But the narrator says, “People just started coming closer, being more and more curious about my smell. I felt like I was always mobbed.” Although he is getting a desired social response, the smell of his deodorant carries a repulsive cultural history and also an individual, psychosomatic response. The tragic waste of consumer culture is nauseated, but still driven back to consumerism. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Exiles, by Matthew Kirkpatrick

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Kirkpatrick

Ricochet Press

57 pages, $10.00

 

Review by Matt Pincus

 

In late February Matthew Kirkpatrick wrote an article in The Believer about a McDonalds constructed to seem like it’s floating at a shopping plaza in Berwyn, IL. He discusses how an architecturally significant building is antithetical to the corporate notion of a “less is more” philosophy, where the space is a container so one associates with and attaches it to the brand name. Corporate stores are homogenous because they make the consumer familiar and comfortable with their products.

Kirkpatrick’s style, in his novel, The Exiles, on the surface, consists of simple sentences that act as similar containers. The language is generic, abstract in a sense, such as when discussing the protagonist James: “The boy says they have not seen Dad in years.” The girl across the street from James “sits at the dinner table inside the dark dining room, eating her salad, and watches her father on the weight bench in the living room.” The text breaks through the small container of sentence with adjectives, little vignettes of Gothic context. One wonders first of all how James does not recognize his Dad, who is possibly trapped, locked in the basement. Another instance is the parents across the street who run on treadmills during the day and lock their daughter in the house during the night, and the way she accepts and fears their negligence as well as their omnipresent parental authority, which she expresses through her habit of running in circles out in the backyard. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Whack-Job Girls & Other Stories, by Bonnie ZoBell

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Whack

Monkey Puzzle Press
58 pgs. / $10.00

Review by Matt Pincus

The Whack-Job Girls & Other Stories is a chapbook compiled from flash fiction pieces, the nouveau riche vignettes of current literature. ZoBell, in an interview with Rumjhum Biswas says, “Every single story came from prompts in the Flash Factory at Zoetrope Virtual Studio.” She goes on to say that prompts are ways for her to write about characters, scenarios, or themes she would normally not conceive or imagine.

Although this is true for most authors, ZoBell is able to capture a poetic lyric in short narratives of socially and economically outcast women in her text: the maid working at an upscale hotel called upon to attend to a room at three AM, or the Midwesterner from Spokane who rides a train to Harlem when “the only black people [she] ever saw were Crips and Bloods in movies of the week.” These stories develop their characters’ personal situations (a mother having phone sex for extra income or a woman who sells her Mustang to pay the credit card bill) but there is also a layer of gothic séance, which produces a feeling one gets from a Denis Johnson or Shirley Jackson novel. Continue reading →