PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksElegant in its brevity, The Twilight World (through Michael Hoffman’s translation) makes cogent Onoda’s story, offering a rendering that accords in most particulars with the chronology Onoda establishes in his memoir. Both understand his experience as one \'outside the flow of time,\' as Onoda writes. And both create memorable images of warfare by evoking, for instance, the bluish shine of bullets at night ... Given that The Twilight World adopts as much as alters Onoda’s retelling of events, however, Herzog’s refusal to recognize the 1974 publication seems ungenerous. That said, the atmospheres the two books create and the ideas they develop are radically distinct. Onoda’s story is a guide thronged with facts about the making of tools and the mending of clothing, complete with meticulous line drawings. The Twilight World is a reverie less focused on delineating action than on rendering impressions ... By unspooling Onoda’s figure at this gravid pace, Herzog gestures adeptly toward his character’s tensely executed but excruciatingly patient maneuvers in a world dense with plants and buzzing with insect life. Drawing out the scene, the writer transforms action into an opportunity for reflection ... At its best, the book moves with a dreaminess that does not sacrifice the satisfactions of concrete image ... there is at times a thinness to the prose. Where the book’s language becomes abstract, its central character’s strange existence diffuses into a mist that renders him insubstantial. In Herzog’s films, this ghostly quality works in startling and memorable counterpoint to sumptuous cinematography and soundtracks that distill and clarify so skillfully that the experience of watching and listening becomes almost tactile. But however philosophical they are, novels satisfy in part by illuminating the feeling lives of their characters. In the end, it’s hard work to elucidate ideas without leaching fiction of its sustaining immediacy.
Colm Tóibín
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksOne of the pleasures of reading this book is watching it push against the expectations of the war story. Most World War II narratives are highly colored, billboard-loud affairs ... This novel echoes the quiet mourning that wells up in Schubert and the spare lyricism of 12-tone composer Arnold Schoenberg ... Sweeping but subtle ... Tóibín is at his best in The Magician when evoking feelings so composite that they recall the wake left by haunting musical phrases. The Magician does not shy away from open conflict, but its savagery unfolds at the dinner table rather than the front ... At its heart, this book is a luminous tribute to another’s faith in language—that stay against personal tragedy and political disaster. Tóibín’s own art of loss creates inflections as lasting.
Rachel Kushner
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books... brilliant ... offers many insights — elegies bracing and tender, maps to the conceptual geometries where art meets commerce, and lapidary homages to writers whose gifts have informed [Cusk\'s] thinking ... Pictures in this collection remain afterimages the mind’s eye cannot easily blink away ... These essays are more committed to investigating the choices people make within their circumscribed locales than to lingering over the self writ small ... Across these essays, Kushner gives us indestructible characters — people who are just themselves — as she simultaneously prompts readers to consider \'what life was like for a person such as them\' ... In her work, want is not so much something to be cauterized as to be explored. Her essays parse this condition in two ways: as desire and as deprivation.
