PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe book I was expecting was something closer to a confessional memoir: a critic at the height of an illustrious career finally admitting which of his assumptions and judgments had been wrong ... Now, such a confession does shadow The Real Work and in fact may be its secret subject. But its explicit subject is more wayward and more ordinarily charming: how it might be possible to derive a general formula for mastery from a series of learning scenarios ... The result is a digressive, improvised collage of seemingly unrelated forms of expertise, and some of its pleasures are Gopnik’s excursions into professional jargon — he takes his title from magicians’ shoptalk — and techniques ... The book’s final axiom is its most profound, all the more so for also being unexpected ... The Real Work may not seem like a critic’s book about art, but its conclusion hints at a way of resolving the apparent tension between critics and artists. After all, each needs the other — in the moment of performance.
Emmanuel Carrère, tr. John Lambert
PositiveNew York Review of BooksYoga presents itself as a mess and never deviates from this image ... The most moving moments in Yoga are those when Carrère describes the depths of his depression during his stay in the psychiatric hospital ... But his ongoing obsession with the sensational and the lurid, with tales of suffering and unreality, can also destabilize the entire project, because the account of his madness is enclosed within that longer chain of stories: a friend’s murder, a friend’s death, the endurance of refugees as they wait for their futures to be processed on a Greek island. Each singular narrative begins to dissolve into the others, all told in Carrère’s fluently rueful and complicit and never inelegant sentences ... It’s as if Carrère in Yoga is trying to argue for a total universality of suffering, a mystical experience of horror ... The problem is that these versions lose their specificity; they are warped by their proximity to Carrère’s true subject, which is himself.
Mario Levrero, tr. Annie McDermott
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewAnglophone readers now have the opportunity to read Levrero at the dazzling end of this zigzagging progress...in precisely comic and melancholic translations ... strange charm. Once you’re inside this patient record of daily existence, with all its interruptions and exhausting errands, you start to see corresponding hints of unexpected triumphs and illuminations. The diary may be a museum of unfinished stories, but a story, this book shows, doesn’t need to be finished to have its own meanings — the largest of which may be that the transcendental experience Levrero is after has been visible all along, in this diary of everyday disaster ... Yes, the diary is a novel, after all — one that leads the reader to two surprisingly optimistic conclusions. As you read The Luminous Novel, it becomes possible to believe that people can be defined by their attempts at self-sabotage, just as a novel can be defined by a record of its failure — while finding a luminous beauty in the patient presentation of its own mutilation.
Michael Chabon
PositiveThe London Review of BooksChabon’s writing has always preyed and played on traditionally disparaged forms, the pulp of fiction, with an unfashionable and unmodernist pleasure in plot ... The delight of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is in the detail, especially in the descriptions of the invented district ... Following Chandler’s form, Chabon’s narrative proceeds frame by frame, with static conversations linked by ritzy backdrop sentences. There’s a problem here, though. This method encourages redundancy: the book has a strange rhythm, as pure plot is followed by pure padding – sashimi with a side of fries ... The book is glitzy with imagination: and yet it is not quite imagined enough. It is too quick with scenes and emotions that require more exposition.
