PositiveThe New YorkerIn many ways, a sentimental book, forbearing toward its characters and essentially optimistic about the human capacity to change for the better. In clumsier hands, it could have devolved into an apology for men behaving badly ... . In a world that offers little in the way of consequences for abusers—indeed, where abusers can be rewarded for their temerity—we might decide, as Zoé does, to get up, get out, and build another world with anyone willing to try. A life worth living is its own form of revenge, and so is a self you can live it with.
Rachel Kushner
RaveNew York Review of BooksThe book is at once a thriller, a history of the French left, a survey of academic theories about the prehistoric age, and a philosophical novel about human nature. It is also a dazzling work of fiction: brisk, stylish, funny, moving, and, unexpectedly, piercingly moral ... At once terse and vivid, economical and expansive, Kushner’s prose here moves between global capital and hyperlocalized suffering.
Katherine Rundell
RaveThe New York Review of Books... a trim, highly readable study ... accessible without compromising its seriousness of purpose ... I had many thoughts while reading Super-Infinite, but the most persistent one was this: there ought to be more books like it. It announces itself with none of the usual augustness of prestige nonfiction. You can’t use it to stop your door, there is no oil portrait on the cover, and the title says not a word about nations, wars, centuries, or the invention of anything modern. It is light-footed without being in the least light-witted ... Rundell does not claim that John Donne is more relevant today than ever before. She does not tease new discoveries. She assumes that literature is a matter of general concern, and that her own enthusiasm for Donne is worth communicating thoughtfully and with care. That enthusiasm is both intellectual and erotic ... This is the tone: winking, suggestive, sympathetic. Rundell is an excellent storyteller, moving ably between anecdote and analysis and never losing track of her purpose, which is to follow Donne from cradle to grave and convince us to come along. Throughout Super-Infinite, she strikes a fine balance between discussions of Donne’s writing and accounts of his world. The sectarian clashes of the Reformation are, to put it mildly, complex, the inter-imperial wars that doused them in gasoline and used them for tinder even more so. Rundell has the right feel for just how much detail an engaged but nonspecialist reader can take. Theological debates are summarized broadly but neatly, and flashy characters like Robert Devereux, George Villiers, King James I, and even Nicolaus Copernicus amble on and off stage without drawing the spotlight away from the man himself ... This mode works particularly well given that, as Rundell explains in her introduction, there is not that much material when it comes to Donne’s curriculum vitae ... There are plenty of insights into Donne’s poetry threaded through ... especially absorbing when it comes to Donne’s final years.
Richard Zenith
RaveThe New York Review of BooksIt is no secret that modern art, with its embrace of so-called primitivist motifs and simultaneous idealization and disparagement of non-European cultures, also profited from the ravages of global capitalism. Pessoa’s poetry was no exception. By placing Pessoa in this larger setting, Zenith makes his urgent abdications of identity as much a response to world-historical events as a private psychological compulsion ... A successful biography will have to do at least one of two things: present new information about its subject or cast well-established facts in a new light. Pessoa does both, in elegant, engaging prose that has the propulsive energy of a historical novel fueled by the occasional jolt of surrealism ... Zenith has also done considerable work translating unpublished documents and recovering the stories behind Pessoa’s failed magazine projects ... At its best, Zenith’s biography is an act of intellectual magic in exactly this sense. By giving Pessoa the kind of body he never really wanted—distinct, desiring, of the world and not merely surrounded by it—the book reconciles this singularly single being to his multiple selves.
