A man travels alone to an island. There he reflects on his life as an artist- a writer- and on the women he has loved. Soon the reader realizes that this man is on the edge of sanity, and his review of his life is his attempt to retain what he can of sanity and meaning. Renderings is a novel written so tightly that no air escapes and no impurity seeps in. Harlan Ellison says of the author: "It is quite possible that speaking of Jim Sallis in the same tone as Poe and Dostoevski is not overblowing on my part. His early work indicates a mind and a talent of uncommon dimensions... He may well be one of the significant ones." New York Newsday: "Sallis is a rare find...a fine prose stylist with an interest in moral struggle and a gift for the lacerating evocation of loss." Twentieth Century Fiction Writers: "James Sallis's extraordinary fiction is distinguished by it honesty and meticulous artistry."
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
``The fiction of these pages, these scenes, these renderings? Half memory, half improvisation. Or the fiction of art itself, for it will not save us. hoping to lure into the net of these deft metaphors something besides (for this part is true) dying fish, dead loves, defalcations.'' Well. Sallis is a talented translator, critic and author of three Lew Griffin detective novels, but this experimental novel of a writer's life and loves is sadly cliched. Sallis seems to have adopted all the sterotyped trappings of literary fiction without really adding something of himself. He mentions various writers, but one that is mentioned frequently and tellingly is Blaise Cendrars--as is Cendrars's missing hand, perhaps a metaphor for the often mentioned complications of writing. Sallis incorporates all the difficulty and disjunctiveness of Cendrars but without the French author's wild inventiveness. For the most part, he relies on stock literary footage of undergrad angst (``The sky looms overhead like promises one should live up to. I read Dostoevski and wait for meals. Today, walking in the hills, I came across a grave site.'') and even decor (``On most of one wall I stapled news photos of torture and mass murders in Latin America.... The wall opposite was hung with color reproductions of surrealist paintings.'')
Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
"James Sallis is one of the best writers in the United States." -- Sue Walker, Editor, Negative Capability
"James Sallis' extraordinary fiction is distinguished by its honesty and meticulous artistry." -- Twentieth Century Fiction Writers
"Sallis'... work indicates a mind and a talent of uncommon dimensions...He may well be one of the significant ones." -- Harlan Ellison
"James Sallis' extraordinary fiction is distinguished by its honesty and meticulous artistry." -- Twentieth Century Fiction Writers
"Sallis'... work indicates a mind and a talent of uncommon dimensions...He may well be one of the significant ones." -- Harlan Ellison
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