"Funeral for a Dog" by Thomas Pletzinger
A review by Chad Post
Mirroring the image of Borromean rings [1] that serves as the primary image for this debut novel, Funeral for a Dog intertwines three storylines: First, there's Daniel Mandelkern, an ethnologist turned journalist who works for his wife, Elisabeth, a woman whose first child died at birth and wants to try again. Now. He's not necessarily comfortable with this, or himself, but regardless of Daniel's insecurities, his wife sends him off on assignment to Italy to write a profile of... Dirk Svensson, a recluse who authored The Story of Leo and the Notmuch, an illustrated children's book that's become a surprising success. Svensson has a bit of a sordid backstory -- one that gets pieced together over the course of the novel, mainly through interstitial pieces that are from Svensson's Astroland, a collection of stories about his unique menage a trois relationship with Tuuli and Felix. This relationship ends, someone is the father of Tuuli's son, and Svensson escapes first into post-9/11 ...
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Previously Reviewed by The Quarterly Conversation
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The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys by Lilian Pizzichini
 "I think we do ourselves and literature a disservice which [when?] we try to untangle what we call the facts from the fiction. As if there were two parallel lines which never met." -- Jeanette Winterson
The biography of Jean Rhys which has just been published by W.W. Norton is not a biography. It...
The System of Vienna: From Heaven Street to Earth Mound Square by Gert Jonke
 When Austrian dramatist, poet, and author Gert Jonke died from pancreatic cancer at age 62 last year, British journalist Guy Dammann lamented that he passed just as his readership was finally beginning to match his reputation:
At its height his reputation was grounded principally on the widespread ...
Brecht at Night (Baltic Literature) by Mati Unt
 If you leave out enough, then that one word, for instance night in the phrase when night falls, will begin to reverberate. It will correspond exactly to what the reader is imagining, become its equivalent. Because inflation is the death of every economy. Words can drop their retinue and meet one...
The Ninth (Writings from an Unbound Europe) by Ferenc Barnas
 Telling a story from a child's point of view is one of the most difficult modes of fiction to write successfully. The narrator of Ferenc Barnas's The Ninth is a nine-year-old boy -- the ninth child of ten (eleven, counting the brother who died) in a large Hungarian family -- whose inexperience and...
Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt
 Ray of the Star opens with two nods in the direction of French writer Georges Perec. The first, a quotation from his 1967 novel A Man Asleep, serves as entry to the story: Now you must learn how to last. A man named Harry has suffered the unexpected deaths of some people, likely family members...
Castle by J. Robert Lennon
 In his previous -- and best-known -- novel, Mailman (2003), J. Robert Lennon, a connoisseur of misanthropy, recounts the disintegration of a postal worker with faded dreams of glory as a physicist. Even as he makes his appointed rounds each day, fifty-seven-year-old Albert Lippincott detests his...
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