MixedThe Coachella Reviewhe reader might imagine the briefer stories to be a sign of the times, a nod to flash fiction. But it’s more likely to be a choice of substance, not form, from a genius of succinct narrative. Throughout this collection, and especially in these shortest pieces, the haiku-like prose is condensed and concentrated. Intense and sparse, there is a bleached and stripped quality to Hempel’s writing. Her narrators, reluctant to yield up their secrets, force us to read between the lines. The reader is left, generally, with a lot of work to do ... Rendered here is a disconcerting world of love, loss, longing, and regret, where there is little embellishment or flourish, and even less comfort ... As ever with Hempel, there is that narrative voice that manages, at once, to be both shredded and luscious; saying little but saying a lot ... But it has to be said that some of the stories, and the shortest ones in particular, almost implode into the void of their sparsity. They seem starved of oxygen, and thus at times are not accomplished organically ... Hempel’s ability to compress meaning is plain. But it may be overdone in these vignettes, these fragments of stories in which the reader has too little to work with. It feels, in places, like a wireframe instead of a skeleton, and very little like a body ... No wonder, then, that Sing to It lights up in the longer stories. It’s not because the narrative voice changes from its usual level of brevity and concentration. It’s because there is space for a little more objective meaning to engage the reader, for the work to be more fully accomplished ... the narrative is barely sustained sometimes, a dilemma which is both emblematic of Hempel’s skill and symptomatic of the struggle that attends some of the stories.
Simon Ings
PositiveThe GuardianIngs conveys the tragedy and the triumph of science in the Soviet Union, though the tragedy outweighs the triumph in his account. A different choice, with more emphasis on physics and mathematics, would have tilted the balance more toward triumph. Ings is interested in people, their characters, choices and the positions they found themselves in, and he succeeds in bringing out their personalities. This is a fascinating story of brilliant scientists and charlatans, of visionaries and careerists, of civic courage and moral cowardice ... The picture he paints contrasts starkly with the hopes espoused by the Bolsheviks. Is the Soviet experience to be treated as something exotic, not relevant to us? What does it tell us generally about science and society? Ings makes a few brief comments on this, but does not draw any systematic conclusion.
