RaveThe Financial Times (UK)From the first assured pages of Afterlives, a book of quiet beauty and tragedy, it is clear one is in the hands of a master storyteller ... without the slightest trace of exoticism — just a story of lives lived against the backdrop of larger events — Gurnah makes us care about the fate of his characters, and by extension the physical and psychological space they occupy ... Gurnah’s phrasing has a languorous, soothing quality, even if the events described are anything but. Only in the novel’s final, shocking pages does the pace quicken and is the true meaning of the story — or at least one aspect of its meaning — revealed ... In addition to the main characters, there are several secondary ones, including Germans who play decisive roles in the narrative. Not one is a caricature. All are drawn with a few deft strokes of the pen ... The fact that Afterlives takes a while to settle on its centre of gravity fits an important theme. Everyone has a story, even if they seem peripheral to the grander sweep ... There is an east African proverb that when elephants fight it is the grass that suffers. Gurnah is far too subtle a writer to resort to such cliché. But this is a story of the grass.
Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel
PositiveFinancial Times (UK)Occasionally, galleries put on exhibitions of an artist’s sketches. Instead of finished works or acknowledged masterpieces, on display are doodles in which the painter experiments with the concepts that will eventually be incorporated into more mature work...First Person Singular reads like that. Only instead of youthful preparatory work, these are the musings of an older man looking back on some of the Murakami-esque things that happened to him in his real, or imagined, youth ... The writing can be simple to the point of banal. The ideas are more elaborately developed in earlier, more complete works...or that reason, Murakami first-timers should probably skip this slight volume and go for one of those more substantial novels instead ... Yet there is something for Murakami aficionados in these stories by a writer at ease in his own skin. The search for truth is less urgent.
Augustine Sedgewick
MixedThe Financial Times... a book whose style and approach will appeal to some readers more than others. The text is both a curio-shop of forgotten snippets of history and quirky facts ... The attempt to turn coffee into the story of global capitalism, though not without its successes, falls short of Harvard historian Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014), a masterly exercise in explaining the modern world through a single commodity...Sedgewick’s effort to do the same sometimes reads less like a well-thought-out theory and more like a jumble of anecdotes, personalities, philosophies and locations. His approach is distracting in both senses of the word. The multiple digressions are often entertaining. But the book’s overarching theme of labour exploitation occasionally gets lost in the clutter ... Still, there is much to enjoy in these pages ... Sedgewick’s attempt to make coffee the history of everything does not always work ... Sedgewick’s style can be a little too baroque. But there is much here to entertain, educate and — dare one say it of a book about coffee — stimulate.
Richard Lloyd Parry
RaveThe Financial TimesIn still, novelistic prose, he rescues from the depths of the ocean and the foul-smelling mud the lives that were ended on that day. As much as the dead, he deals with the half-dead, the living who trudge on through life with the guilt of the survivor, contemplating what they could or should have done to save their daughter or sister or husband ... [Parry] is able to draw something meaningful, even lovely, from the well of misery ... Overall, the strength of the book lies in its stories, its observations and its language ... There is, as Parry notes towards the end of the book, 'no tidying away of loose ends.' If anything, it is the accounts of the dead, both while they were living and in their absence, that illuminate our own brief existence and give it a kind of meaning. The 'stories alone show the way.'”
Justine van der Leun
RaveThe Financial Times...[a] gripping and mournful account of reconciliation — and its lack — in post-apartheid South Africa ... The book recreates the murder in the manner of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, probing events from the perspective of numerous participants and witnesses ... Perhaps the book’s only flaw is that at more than 500 pages it is a touch long. But that is a minor quibble. Beautifully written and carefully observed, some readers might actually wish it were longer.
