History Reimagined
 |
|
| Sloane Crosley | |
During Sloane Crosley's very funny event at Elliott Bay Book Co. in Seattle to promote The Clasp (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26), she remarked on what's next for her. "Back to essays," she said, as she's already started writing them. And because she's under contract for them, she added with a laugh. The author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake went on to say that she really enjoys writing essays since she can rely on, you know, real life instead of making everything up, as she did for the novel.
It got me thinking about fiction that doesn't necessarily make everything up, but rather reimagines reality. For instance, William Boyd's latest novel, Sweet Caress (Bloomsbury, $28). Inspired by an anonymous, unattributed photograph of a young woman bathing in a pond, Boyd crafts the life story of Amory Clay, a woman of androgynous identity who embraces photography as a form of artistic expression. The novel, then, is illustrated with numerous photos with similarly inscrutable origins. Boyd happens to be a collector, and applies his finely tuned fiction to the canvas of a real-life, yet unidentified, woman.
Amber Tamblyn does something similar in her poetry collection Dark Sparkler (HarperPerennial, $17.99). We can argue about whether poetry is fiction another time, but I wanted to mention her mesmerizing take on Hollywood starlets whose lives ended from unnatural causes. Sharon Tate, Marilyn Monroe, Brittany Murphy and many others receive Tamblyn's imaginative empathy, and the poet, after thorough research, tells different, fuller versions of their stories.
Conversely, Catherynne M. Valente twists Hollywood history altogether in Radiance (Tor, $24.99). In it, Severin Unckdocumentary, a filmmaker, and daughter of a famous director, disappears from a shoot on Venus in 1944. I like to think that alternate histories like Valente's occur amid the same literary family tree as Karl Ove Knausgaard's autobiographical fiction, which I'd consider to be cousin to memoir and personal essays. Which brings us back to Sloane. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness
Zinky boys were the dead teenagers sent home from Afghanistan in sealed zinc coffins. Alexievich interviewed survivors of all kinds, amputees and those who lost more than limbs in the war that broke the faith of Russians in their country. Her book about the military disaster that consumed a generation records the testimonies of infantrymen and paratroopers, sergeants and civilians, medics and mothers, nurses and interpreters, widows and engineers, and lets them tell their truths--betrayed by the government, deceived by the press, tricked into volunteering to "go to the aid of the Afghan people."
In the same manner, her fourth book--Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, translated by Keith Gessen (Picador, $16 paperback)--covers the 1986 fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the largest technological disaster of the century, 10 times as radioactive as the explosion at Hiroshima. Alexievich doesn't hesitate to show that the nightmare was compounded by incompetence, indifference and out-and-out lies, with 4,000 deaths directly attributable to the accident, while "the number of people with cancer, mental retardation, neurological disorders and genetic mutations increases with each year."
Stoner languished in obscurity until John Doyle, of Crawford Doyle Booksellers in New York City, recommended the novel to a New York Review of Books editor. NYRB Classics republished Stoner in 2006. Since then, Williams's once-forgotten novel has achieved astounding success. Critics have hailed it as a rediscovered treasure and lost masterpiece. Bret Easton Ellis said Stoner is "one of the great unheralded 20th-century American novels." Ian McEwan called it "a beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life."
