Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...outset, Mundome's principal character seems to be one of those pretentiously arch, self-preoccupied creatures-remotely derived from Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, and strained through the literary strictures of French neorealism-who infest European fiction. His name is Richard. He is a library archivist in charge of, yes, "fugitive and ephemeral materials." He is also the kind of man who will say, "Things are sometimes what they seem." But before the reader can begin to snarl or groan this incipient literary hedgehog changes into a devoted brother. His pretty sister Meg has just come home after...
...author start writing fiction? "I guess because it can do what I used to think philosophy ought to do-shake people up. Get them to question basic assumptions about reality." Or, as Richard warns in another connection, "You couldn't be sure. In the meantime, it was best to take nothing for granted...
...what motivated the author? Was she really like her characters? Now, after 20 years, Sagan has apparently decided to take her readers more into her confidence. The equivocal result is Scars on the Soul, a blend of fiction, personal reflection and autobiographical episode, which, the author notes, is neither literature nor true confession...
Those who believe in the truths of fiction have always been sure that enough talent could work such magic, and in The Barking Deer Jonathan Rubin shows considerable talent. Even so, the author wisely does not try to capture the war in its dreadful magnitudes of size and duration. He ambushes a piece of it from a Montagnard village in the central Vietnamese highlands, circa 1964, just before the machinery of destruction began to dwarf its human masters...
...publishers, but he had no reputation, no work to show and no agent. Most houses "would write back and say, 'Sorry, fella, no one wants to buy a first novel about Viet Nam.' " Eventually, George Braziller, publisher of the antiwar book 365 Days, and Edward Seaver, his fiction editor, saw half of the final draft and advised Rubin to keep polishing. So did Wife Maura, whose job as a consultant for conservation groups in Washington allowed Rubin to stay home in Alexandria, Va., and write...