TRANSMISSION
BY HARI KUNZRU
Penguin, £7.99
When Arjun Mehta, the Delhi computer programmer whose dream of working in America has soured in the face of an economic downturn, unleashes the Leela virus in a misguided attempt to hang on to his job, his fate is loosely entwined with that of Guy Swift, a marketing executive so cutting edge as to have disappeared almost entirely up his own fundament, and Leela Zahir, the brightest new Bollywood star. Kunzru’s slick plotting has too much of the farcical about it to leave much room for genuine emotional depth, but his wide-ranging observations of the modern world crackle with humour and insightfulness.
MY LIFE IN CIA
BY HARRY MATHEWS
Dalkey Archive, £8.99
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Exasperated throughout the 1960s by his artist and intellectual friends’ suspicion that he was a CIA agent, Mathews, a Paris-based American novelist, decided in 1973 to stop protesting and begin acting as though he were. My Life in CIA (insiders eschew the definite article, apparently), an “autobiographical fiction”, chronicles this year of subterfuge. Mathews’s parlour game, born of boredom, results in run-ins with communists, right-wingers and tantric sex enthusiasts. As a thriller, his playful novel will disappoint, but it is fascinating as an exercise in blurring the distinctions between fact and fiction, recollection and fantasy, legitimacy and hoax.
OBLIVION: STORIES
BY DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Abacus, £7.99
Reading Wallace’s obsessively digressive fictions can be an arduous task, but there lies at the heart of most of them a truth, or more often an intellectual point, worth grasping. This collection, the author’s first work of published fiction in five years, dwells on the impossibility of communicating individual thought in its entirety, advertising’s co-opting of irony (and thus its diminution as a useful artistic tool), and, in its final story, the shadow of 9/11. The opening story, Mister Squishy, also subtly hints at that terrorist attack, switching between a sinister figure crawling up the side of a skyscraper and an agonisingly bored market researcher within.
DARIEN DOGS
BY HENRY SHUKMAN
Vintage, £6.99
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Lonely, failed men in far-flung locations, from the Caribbean to the Sahara, provide the link between Shukman’s collection of one novella and four short stories. Structural faults detract from the book’s overall impact, but on the level of the sentence, Shukman, a published poet, excels. His descriptions of sudden violence in Mortimer of the Maghreb, which provides the basis for the writer’s new novel, Sandstorm, are excellent, while the awakening to the possibility of a better, purer life by the drunken misanthrope Jim Rogers in the title story proves touching. Despite its failings, Darien Dogs points towards greater things.
THE MAN WHO HATED FOOTBALL
BY WILL BUCKLEY
HarperPerennial, £7.99
Male mid-life crises and jeremiads aimed at cynical Grub Street scribblers are well-trodden literary thoroughfares, but Buckley snatches great pleasure from the jaws of over- familiarity thanks to the quality of his wit. His description of a pack of doe-eyed sports journalists flocking around Michael Owen after his World Cup goal against Argentina as “verging on the paedophilic” is superb, and while the disaffected broadsheet sports writer Jimmy Stirling’s inability to come to terms with his father’s death does not quite succeed in conveying the gravitas it most probably hopes to, his utter disgust for his profession and boozy crumpledness carry the day.