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Recent Reviews
Javier Marias
Rave The Guardian (UK) Margaret Jull Costa, with her habitual skill, has rendered Marías\'s precise, somewhat laconic Spanish into graceful and equally laconic English, but the title necessarily defeats her ... The classical themes of love, death and fate are explored with elegant intelligence by Marías in what is perhaps his best novel so far. The story\'s literary underpinnings are Macbeth (as is usual in Marías), Balzac\'s Colonel Chabert and, more surprisingly, Dumas\'s The Three Musketeers, all glossed by Díaz Varela, who paternalistically instructs Dolz on the importance these three books have for him ... Marías is an old hand at hoodwinking the reader, layering his novels with plots that seem, each one, final, but then suddenly blossom into something unexpected.
Amos Oz, Trans. by Nicholas de Lange
Rave The Washington Post A Tale of Love and Darkness (beautifully translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange) appears to merely chronicle Oz's life from childhood in British-ruled Jerusalem to literary fame in Kibbutz Hulda, where Oz (born Amos Braz) still lives and where he adopted his nom de plume. But there are no single straight lines in Oz's narratives; for him, all things are plural … Oz describes what it was (and is) like to live in a country that, since its inception, has been constantly under threat; and he tells of the painful relationship between Arab and Jew … It is impossible to give a full account of this book's riches. Oz has allowed his autobiography to flow along a rocky course, with numerous starts and various endings.
Jack Lynch
Positive The New York Times Book Review “...a lively and erudite history of [lexicography] ... You Could Look It Up can serve as a reminder of our enduring and impudent desire to keep the chaotic universe in some kind of neat and serviceable order.
Umberto Eco, Trans. by Richard Dixon
Pan The Guardian But passions, especially literary ones, can eventually become overwhelming, and in Numero Zero, instead of giving his readers judicious measures of his research into society’s paranoias, Eco fills page after page with seemingly endless lists of divergent historical fantasies.