PositiveThe Kenyon Review... a suspenseful, surreal, and nightmarish novel ... a thriller of unsettling quiet: about how to disappear into the crowd, to erase your otherness and melt into your surroundings ... the novel’s gigantic sense of dread is woven largely by way of its masterful and restrained prose. NDiaye tells Herman’s tale with a stark frankness that allows the reader to notice when specific words are repeated, developing meanings unique to the text ... Even the very structure of the book helps construct its sense of unease ... As Herman struggles to keep his family in sight while he is lured by the siren song of the village, That Time of Year emerges as a tale of pastoral idyll gone horribly wrong.
Maryse Condé, trans. by Nicole Simek
PositiveAsymptoteTranslated from the French by Nicole Simek, Condé’s prose moves effortlessly through the conversational, the crass, and the beautiful during Dieudonné’s nearly twenty-four hour journey ... Through Dieudonné’s encounters with these strangers, and the corresponding portrait of a nation gripped by a media trial, The Belle Créole is as invested in locality as it is in personality, allowing the novel freedom from the traditional claustrophobic trappings of an excessively individual novel ... In The Belle Créole,/em>, characters ache for personal renewal or nationwide revolution, and pine, consciously or unconsciously, for the means by which it might occur.
