RaveThe Times Literary SupplementBoth history and rallying cry, Peter Pomerantsev’s book is a remarkable and illuminating guide to the nature and possibilities of propaganda. Written with palpable urgency, it cements the author’s reputation as one of the leading experts in information warfare; more than that, amid much despair, it even manages to strike a tentative note of optimism.
Andrey Platonov, trans. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
RaveThe Financial Times[Platonov\'s] meticulous eye for detail could all too easily spot the ironies, absurdities and contradictions of Soviet reality ... Chevengur masterfully weaves together the dreams and desolations of the starving and dispossessed rural communities living through the savage early years of Bolshevik rule ... Overflowing with Platonov’s often perilous honesty, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler’s moving translation captures all the dazzling horror of this Soviet utopia.
Rupert Christiansen
RaveThe Spectator (UK)... where Christiansen’s book comes into its own is in its description of the radical and lasting changes that Diaghilev brought to bear on the art form – changes made all the more striking by some extended, insightful considerations of what came before and after the fact. Part biography, part history of ballet in the 20th century, the book looks at how the larger-than-life impresario was able to take what was at the end of the 19th century the ‘childish business’ of ballet and not only drag it, often through sheer force of will, into artistic maturity, but also establish it as ‘a crucial piece in the jigsaw of western culture’ ... Christiansen does not shy from the more challenging aspects of his life and legacy as viewed today ... While Christiansen, as he explains in his preface, may not have set out to ‘thrill scholars and experts’ with a radical reassessment of Diaghilev’s life, he ultimately achieves something else entirely. Diaghilev’s Empire is a riveting account of a visionary who, for all his many faults, truly did make himself indispensable. Written with sympathy and wit, the book is judiciously researched; but, more crucially, it draws on a lifetime of balletomania, giving readers the benefit of exceptional range. It is also a delicious read into the bargain.
Yevgenia Belorusets, tr. Eugene Ostashevsky
PositiveFinancial Times (UK)... immediate and eccentric stories ... lucid English translation ... In documenting the bizarre twists and fragmentary turns inherent throughout these stories of loss and trauma, Belorusets draws on the grotesquerie of Nikolai Gogol’s fantasies and the absurdist gallows humour of Daniil Kharms, whose haunting vignettes responded so well to the terror and seeming unreality of life in the Soviet Union. Yet against the alarming backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this week, these combinations produce an especially unsettling awareness of the myriad ways in which imagination walks hand in hand with violent reality ... In describing the effects of one of the most brutal conflicts to have occurred during — and to be in part aided by — the age of fake news, Lucky Breaks asks essential questions about the ethical implications of blurring the boundary between fiction and reality ... a perverse logic but an effective one — one that lays bare the device of so much manufactured reality at the heart of the war.
Yoko Tawada, tr. Margaret Mitsutani
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... this is no jeremiad or lament for a long-lost land. For one thing, the nostalgia Hiruko feels is centred on language itself, not any time, place or former identity ... This could almost be satirical, but scarcely in this novel’s carefully woven fabric is a detail provided without its serving to reinforce the same, all too predictable, set of ideological assumptions. Sympathetic characters are introduced explicitly by their leftist political credentials; figures of authority and law enforcement (always men) are to be feared; and the blame for environmental catastrophe is laid squarely and with a troubling sense of absolution on the political class. Even language does not escape this treatment: Hiruko’s briefly charming Panska is revealed to be born of a fear that speaking English will lead to her being sent to America, where the broken healthcare system will, she is certain, fail her ... Tawada has certainly achieved the goal of highlighting the arbitrariness or even meaninglessness of borders, nations and fixed identities, and of holding up the inequalities of western immigration policies to scrutiny. The craftmanship of Scattered All Over the Earth is impeccable and the language, so skilfully translated by Margaret Mitsutani, is every bit as inventive as fans of Yoko Tawada’s work have come to expect. Still, the lethal charm and cute politics of this fantasy belie thornier, harsher realities that would surely have been better served by a more dialectic response.
Olga Tokarczuk, Tr. Jennifer Croft
RaveFinancial Times (UK)Marrying a vast array of historical sources with modern scholarship and daring literary invention, The Books of Jacob is an amalgam of vignettes and voices, histories and fragments, maps and illustrations ... Charismatic and with more than a dash of psychopathy, Frank is an endlessly fascinating character study, and it is easy to see why he is deserving of such generous novelistic treatment ... While Tokarczuk’s recreation of a Europe grappling with the Enlightenment is perhaps the work’s most immediately dazzling achievement, what equals this, as one immersive page gives way to the next, is the verisimilitude and depth of her characters ... For all its forbidding weight, the writing remains fluid and engaging, often poetic. None of this, it must be said, could have been possible without the Herculean efforts of Tokarczuk’s translator. A text as thorny and arcane as this could easily become overwrought and leaden in translation; anglophone readers ought to be especially grateful to Croft, who handles Tokarczuk’s writing with the deft touch of an expert, and pulls off the almost miraculous feat of recreating a text in which, amid the English, words of Polish, Hebrew, Latin and Turkish jostle against one another naturally.
Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel
PanThe Times Literary SupplementOn the face of it, these tales may seem like elegantly constructed miniatures or vignettes that echo the perennial themes of Murakami’s more substantial fiction. But where his novels skilfully blend nostalgia with burgeoning sexuality and juxtapose fragmented realities against urgent quests for meaning, these stories are permeated by a vagueness and languor that border on complacency. Promising ideas trail off with almost wanton persistence, dissolving in the real Murakami’s own seeming apathy ... When these insight-averse narrators are not basking in an unperturbed aura of self-ignorance, they ply the reader with an almost unrelenting litany of clichés ... we are left wondering whether we are somehow being mocked. Perhaps Murakami’s point is that there is no point, which is all well and good, but in the absence of other, more redeeming features, it does not make for very satisfying literature. The characteristically aloof voice of each story, calculated to charm, masks the emptiness of this commercial brand of postmodernism, short-changing the audience while expecting it to supply all the meaning. At its best, First Person Singular is limp, insipid and apathetic; at worst, it seems to express outright contempt for its readers.
Nino Haratischvili, Trans. by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... vast yet elegant ... rendered soberly and robustly from the original German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin – and it demonstrates a technical mastery, impressively sustained. Of particular success is Haratischvili’s juxtaposition of historical processes alongside the all-too-human cost of tyranny. So often her protagonists are subjected to the ever-blackening realities of their existence without losing sight of hope or dignity. What might risk slipping into overwrought melodrama is here presented with a detachent that ultimately increases the emotional impact. This effect is bolstered by the myriad historical details – snatches of popular songs, poems, revolutionary slogans – that pepper the novel and were garnered from the two years of research that Haratischvili conducted in Russia. One criticism is that the author can be a little too preoccupied with national stereotyping...At times like these the novel can read a little like a Georgian primer for the uninitiated ... is more than a family saga: it is an ode, a lamentation, a monument – to Georgia, its people, its past and future.
