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I quickly discovered that I am not BOMB’s target audience, although I did like the interviews. The bulk of the magazine is concerned with the visual arts scene, about which I know very little. There is, though, an interview with novelist Howard Norman (whose work I also know little about). Interviewer Susan Shreve asks him about his latest book, Devotion. His response:
“In Devotion I wanted to construct what Chekhov called ‘a melancholic triangulation.’ That is, three people (William, his daughter Maggie, her husband David) whose individual natures and actions and responses to a single incident intensify each other’s sadness – until they just get sick and tired of the situation and life begins to get better. Devotion to some extent is about the progress of love by indirection.”
There’s also an interview with Peter Nadas, a Hungarian novelist (“Hungary’s leading contemporary writer”) whose work sounds intriguing. Note that BOMB has a great online archive of interviews.
Also the issue has a “literary supplement” – several stories and poems at the back of the magazine. These are stories that play with form and narrative in a way that mostly didn’t hold my interest.
