Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004290216
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Understanding George Garrett By R.H.W. Dillard. University of South Carolina Press. $19.95 (cloth), $7.95 (trade paper).
This is more an announcement than a review. Irv Broughton and Richard Dillard are well known around here and they're friends of mine. I don't pretend to be objective about their books, but that doesn't stop me from recommending them.
For several years, Irv Broughton has been working on a series of interviews with American authors. He has filled two volumes with 26 interviews and a third book is on the way. His subjects range from such academic writers as William Jay Smith and the late John Ciardi to writers who aim at a wider popular audience: Samuel Fuller and Andre Norton. His interviews are knowledgeable but not altogether serious. Humor is an important element. As an editor, he allows the writers' own voices to come across on the page. That's more difficult than it sounds. If a taped interview is transcribed directly to the printed page, the subject almost always sounds like an idiot, because spoken speech and written speech are so different. But if the editor works too hard to smooth out all of the irregularities, the unique qualities of the voice are lost.
Richard Dillard makes sense of George Garrett's fiction and poetry in "Understanding George Garrett." His thesis is that even though George Garrett has written in many different forms, some elemental themes about the nature of life and art run through all of his work. Reading this book made me want to go back and take another look at two favorite novels that I haven't visited in decades, "The Finished Man" and "Do, Lord, Remember Me." I also mean to finish that "wildly comic, sharply satirical, unkempt rascal of a book," "Poison Pen."
Dillard's conclusion about Garrett's work is at once simple and complicated: "Recognizing both that people must learn `to lie a little and live together' in this world of lies and that the complex lie of art may be the surest way of speaking the truth in such a world, Garrett has truly gone his own way, and those who have benefited most are his readers, for he has shared with them an intensive and vital imaginative experience."
- MIKE MAYO Book page editor
Frost and Fire By Roger Zelazny. William Morrow and Co. Inc. $16.95.
Award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer Roger Zelazny offers his first collection of stories in six years, and the resulting collection is worth the wait. All 10 stories were published since 1984 and were previously uncollected. As a bonus, Zelazny throws in an introduction about the way he writes, an essay on constructing a science fiction novel, and the text of a 1985 talk given at a sci-fi convention on whether he writes science fiction or fantasy (or a combination of both) and why.
The stories include the stylistically experimental "Permafrost" and "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai," both of which claimed awards in the sci-fi field; a computer comedy; a story featuring Saturn and a short-short on Titan, Saturn's largest moon; a reverse-cliche on vampires and sword-and-sorcery heroics, a battle between ultimate good and evil in a contemporary setting (an updating of the sword-and-sorcery sub-genre); and a couple of stories in science-fiction universes created by Larry Niven ("The Magic Goes Away") and Fred Saberhagen ("Berserkers").
by CNB