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- Title
The Unfamiliar Truth: Three Recent Books of Fiction.
- Authors
Harmon, Joshua
- Abstract
Presents literary criticism with information about three recent books of fiction. Michael Griffith, in his first collection of tort fiction "Bibliophilia," writes as if for such an ideal reader. The book's tide story, a novella, takes place at a Louisiana State University. In it Griffith traces the intertwined stories of a middle-aged former law librarian demoted to a position at the university library, where her supervisor assigns her to the sex watch among the library's deplorable open stacks. Satire may be the most obvious way to transform the familiar, and Griffith uses this technique masterfully here, particularly in the novella's opening pages. The book "The Gangster We Are All Looking For," perhaps best exemplifies Charles Baxter's techniques of defamiliarization. Like the nameless girl who is both the main character and narrator of, this book, the author left postwar Vietnam by boat to settle in California, the events described, here may exist somewhere near the border between fiction and nonfiction. But even if this is the case, he transforms actual experience into a rich melange of memory and imagination. The collision of the familiar and the foreign, as seen through the eyes of a young girl, is rendered here in a remarkable way.
- Subjects
FICTION; BIBLIOPHILIA (Book : Griffith); GANGSTER We Are All Looking For, The (Book); LIBRARIES; SPECIAL librarians
- Publication
Sewanee Review, 2004, Vol 112, Issue 3, p456
- ISSN
0037-3052
- Publication type
Literary Criticism