About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Larissa Pham
Rave Full Stop Pham’s collection boldly reinterprets the memoir-essay genre by accompanying her stories of love with ekphratic commentary on the visual, aural, and verbal language of intimacy. This oblique, innovative method is the author’s makeshift solution to the problem she poses in the collection of how to write on intimacy. Through this form of ekphrasis, she is able to give texture to surface-level events and feelings, as well as to map out her own unique artistic sensibility ... Pham’s absorption with the collection of vessels of intimacy, most explicitly represented by photographs of her and her boyfriend, is motivated by a fear of losing that intimacy, of loss of love. She repeatedly resorts to artifice and performance to construct a narrative of her relationship that preserves intimacy despite its infidelity to reality. If there is a coming-of-age for Pham in this textured, meditative book, then it lies in the shedding of artifice.
Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel
Positive Asymptote In classic Murakami fashion, the enigmatic narrators of these eight stories are all referred to only as \'I,\' except in the most autobiographical of the stories ... It has become a platitude to refer to Murakami’s plots as dreamlike, but the events described here are inexplicably odd, with illogical turns of events and fantastical details ... Nevertheless, throughout the collection, Murakami expresses faith in the writing of memory to approach a sort of truth, even if that truth remains ultimately inaccessible. In that sense, the writing of memory is akin to translation, seeking to recreate by interacting with—rather than perfectly reproducing—the original ... The collection’s encounters with women do suffer from some of the limitations that have appeared elsewhere in Murakami’s work, most notably the problematic representations of its female characters, who can be thinly drawn and sometimes serve—or even sacrificed—as narrative conveniences for the narrator’s self-realization or transformation ... Nevertheless, the collection does also feature female characters like T* in \'Carnaval,\' who are much more central figures and whose impenetrable complexity becomes the subject of the story. Dominant in this mysterious collection are the slipperiness of time and writing as a means of comprehension. In this way, it functions as an autobiography in fragments for the Murakami-like narrator ... In this collection, even as the writing of memory obscures one’s sense of the past, it also clarifies the present.
Maria Stepanova tr. Sasha Dugdale
Rave Asymptote ... elegantly translated ... Stepanova adopts an oblique, multifaceted approach towards her central project of assembling a family history dating from the late nineteenth century. She lodges memoir like a puzzle box within cultural commentary, historical documents from her ancestors, philosophical discourse, and literary criticism; the result is a densely textured memoir-in-fragments that is alive to the limitations of its project—the lack of historical evidence, the inaccuracies in memory, the fraught relationship between the storyteller and her subjects, and the inevitable incompleteness of the family narrative ... Stepanova’s oblique yet layered approach allows her to interrogate the relationship between her personal history, her ancestral history, and the collective cultural history of Europe and Russia ... One of the great achievements of this memoir is that it subtly describes the transformation in the narrator’s perspective towards her ancestral past and the project of writing a family history.
Andre Gide
Rave Full-Stop ... an eminently readable translation ... the authors contend with the inadequacies of their literary forms at conveying a sort of hidden truth. Marshlands is ultimately the author’s failed attempt at expressing this hidden truth, this single idea that becomes so all-consuming that its elucidation becomes his raison d’être. The deft, playful novel is rightly considered one of the first examples of modern metafiction, and arguably of postmodernism, because like Barthes’ autobiography, it rebels against traditional narrative, while ironizing the methods of its form ... What is unique about Gide’s work is the degree of obsession the narrator has for his novel and its completion. He thinks and talks almost exclusively about his novel and its central idea, which is that we are ignorant of the fact we live the same days over and over again ... Ultimately, Marshlands is a novel about a man who wrestles with his faith in a single essential idea. Eventually, the narrator realizes that the release or the \'end\' of this idea might occur with the completion of his novel.
Adania Shibli, Trans. by Elisabeth Jaquette
Rave Full Stop ... elegantly translated ... The novel is halved into two narratives of equal length, one after the other, and the first recounts an atrocity occurring precisely twenty-five years prior to the second. And through this daring and ingenious architecture, Shibli creates a text of resistance in which the second narrative seeks to recover the past events of the first from erasure. Shibli tells both narratives through an absorbing style of methodical, dispassionate reportage with an obsessive attention to mundane detail, as if she were narrating a series of incidents documented on a video camera ... Shibli tells both narratives through an absorbing style of methodical, dispassionate reportage with an obsessive attention to mundane detail, as if she were narrating a series of incidents documented on a video camera ... The manner in which the first narrative is underlaid beneath the second, as if it were a palimpsest, as if it were a town buried and then unearthed in the second, is one of the Shibli’s greatest achievements in the novel. Through her unique double narrative structure, she suggests that the marginalization of the Palestinian people persists and their lives and history remain just as tenuous as ever, threatened by violence and erasure.
Lara Vapnyar
Positive Full Stop ... multidimensional, inventive ... Vapnyar’s poignant, sensitively observed novel can be read as an act of demystification, a study of lost love. It is an attempt to understand love that has departed whether because of betrayal or loss of feeling.
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Positive The Chicago Review of Books ... deftly structured ... In this uplifting, graceful novel, the recovery of one’s ancestral past is an act of empowerment — one that heals grief, clears one’s heart of hatred, and replenishes one’s hope in the future.
Helen Oyeyemi
Positive Full Stop Oyeyemi has always been fascinated with folklore, and the novel subtly works elements of the fairy tale into modern British life ... Oyeyemi’s puzzle-box structure allows her to consistently exert pressure on Harriet’s narrative and probe at its reliability. Oyeyemi dismisses the idea of a single indisputable account of events ... For the reader, the characters also seem cryptic because of Oyeyemi’s disorienting manner of characterization. She starts at a point of caricature and then humanizes her characters by exposing the limitations of that caricature ... Oyeyemi’s initial portrayal of character is often a distortion of the truth, a front that is later shown to be untrustworthy ... Like the outer wall of the Kercheval house whose deep gaps and crenellations conceal the family’s wealth, appearances are often well-orchestrated disguises ... And like most novels of manners, Gingerbread is concerned with the ways in which confining physical spaces can either tighten or disintegrate relations between their residents ... This intricate, wildly imaginative novel ranges from the absurdly comic to the miserably tragic.
Amparo Dávila Trans. by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson
Rave 3AM Magazine Dávila embodies the shapeless terrors of the mind in bedrooms, basements and kitchen corners. Her inescapably bleak worlds are reminiscent of European fabulists such as Kafka and Schulz. In her fiction, the imagined can become terrifyingly real, and the real can seem imagined. She is a poet of dread and brilliantly articulates the ways it congeals and suffocates us until we are immobilised in its claws ... highly focused ... [Dávila\'s] intense and terrifying vision is confining—her stories darken, snuffing out hope rather than illuminating.
Minae Mizumura, Trans. by Juliet Winters Carpenter
Positive Full Stop \"The plotting is brisk, with an aggressive forward momentum more characteristic of thrillers or pulpy fiction. The sixty-six chapters are economical, each detailing a single event or memory. But the fleet-footedness of her plotting matches the profundity of her investigation into family relationships ... The novel’s power, in large part due to this intelligent sequencing of events, lies in the sense that the first chapter’s point of jadedness becomes inevitable, a naturally unnatural response to a lifetime of thwarted dreams.\