Positive4ColumnsKadare’s relentless examination of the anecdote makes it oddly less resolved by the end of A Dictator Calls than it seemed at the outset, like a literary Rubik’s Cube he has turned over and over without making much progress. If anything, I suspect the reader’s sympathies will migrate to Pasternak.
Kathryn Scanlan
Rave4ColumnsThe vignettes that make up Kathryn Scanlan’s horse-racing anti-epic, Kick the Latch, are models of compression ... Miniatures in a miniature, sprightly nuggets...daring to capture the arc of a life or the flavor of the track in the tightest number of strokes possible ... The violence too, somehow pales against the wonder and camaraderie of the strange small world of the track, which she describes with an ethnographer’s touch ... What’s mesmerizing here is Sonia’s voice, her rhythm and gift for telling a story. You forget for most of the ride that it’s a ventriloquy act and the author—Kathryn Scanlan—wields a mean stiletto for a crop.
Justin E H Smith
Positive4ColumnsThe title of Smith’s book is ungainly but cunning in asking not what the internet is but what it isn’t, pushing against our certainties about its very nature. For all the jeremiads, this is a book of nots. The internet age is still in its infancy, and forms of engagement may yet appear that reconfigure how we interact with our digital selves and the mediated world. If we feel that information overload is at the root of our sapped capacities for attention, Smith is quick to note that the same crisis of attention was sounded in the century and a half following Gutenberg’s innovation in printing technology ... One of the pleasures of Smith’s philosophical tour is to note how frequently the implementation of ideas and their consequences jump domains ... The vision that inspired Lovelace has become much more complex as its implications have disclosed themselves. One of the great achievements of Smith’s book is to permit us to honor her legacy, ambition, and achievement—and that of many others both before and after her—while buttressing a healthy and necessary skepticism toward the claims of tech transcendence and the uniqueness of our moment.
Sjón, Tr. Victoria Cribb
Positive4Columns... the normally parsimonious Sjón has topped himself, chiseling his narrative down to its very armature. Red Milk takes its barebones form literally, stripping away everything it can to pursue an autopsy of its odious fictional character ... The landscape of Red Milk is built of such lightning bursts of strangely sharp detail, where the use of colors stands out. It’s a subtle stroke in a novel whose quiet complexity can at first seem elusive: even though the book is in a sense a flashback from Gunnar’s moment of death in his early manhood, this is a landscape proper to a child’s imagination, dreamlike but solid, with all the pronounced lucidity and wild agency that objects and colors assume. Red Milk is no less subtle—or complex—in its caution with language ... Throughout Red Milk, Gunnar is barely there, yet unbearably present. In this short and bleak novel, Sjón makes us think again about what empathy can—and frequently enough simply can’t—achieve.
Tom McCarthy
RaveThe Chicago TribuneC is a historical novel in deconstructionist drag, a loose shell of a story that gives McCarthy the full range to roam around the debris of the early twentieth century. Like the deliriously errant Karl in Kafka\'s Amerika, or the globally hop-scotching comic-strip hero Tintin, about whom McCarthy once wrote a funny book of criticism, Carrefax finds himself thrust into a series of loosely connected scenes drawn from a roster of modernist mythmakers ... The self-consciousness of McCarthy\'s conceit could prove witheringly academic, but C animates a host of big themes - sex, drugs, death, technology, and above all communication - and winds them tightly around each other ... A book that\'s steeped in avant-garde literature and criticism from Pynchon to BarthesV meets and larded with plays on words, C spirals around its character\'s journey like a riddle by the Sphinx. It\'s almost as if it\'s been CCd from the Greeks to the present.
Javier Marias
PositiveBook ForumIt is an odd and certainly counterintuitive mode, perhaps, for what at its heart is a spin on a dime-store crime novel or a made-for-TV melodrama, with its affection for stock characters and portentous gestures, dealing with a murder that seems sewn up until the case begins to unravel ... In a book in which other books—not just Balzac’s, but Macbeth and The Three Musketeers—play intricate leading roles, where literature brushes against the messy flux of life, the relation of story to reality becomes less and less a cut-and-dry question for María ... The Infatuations reads at times as if Marías were offering a novelist’s twist on A Lover’s Discourse wrapped inside a murder mystery ... It might not work if Marías’s sentences didn’t themselves exert such a hypnotic hold. His characters often think and talk with gestures of grandiloquence, which could annoy, or at least have an unlifelike drag, but somehow doesn’t ... The prose of The Infatuations is as casual as spoken language yet paradoxically feels honed to within an inch of its life.
Susan Neiman
PositiveBookforumOne of the more unflinching aspects of Learning from the Germans is her conviction that American and southern realities are more flexible, or at least less inflexible, than most would think ... Neiman acknowledges both the limits and possibilities inherent in her comparative endeavor ... Neiman’s interviews are extensive, and she allows the voices of those involved in thinking about how to address public memory to animate her pages ... Neiman’s firmly focused questions of guilt, reparations, and how to memorialize Till’s murder reveal a variety of motives and dispositions.
Taeko Kōno, Trans. by Lucy North
Rave4 ColumnsTaeko who? She ought to be better known, and in Japan, she is. Beginning with the 1961 story that lends the \'new\' collection Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories its title, the Osaka-born Kono established herself there as one of the most radically talented authors of her generation, a writer’s writer whose often épater work was hailed for its spark and originality by figures as unlike her as Kenzaburo Oe and Shusaku Endo ... There is plenty of suspense, delayed and deferred, in Kono’s stories, which nevertheless refuse anything resembling a tidy ending. In fact, she often opts to end her stories with resonant but gnomic parting scenes and strikingly disjointed images, like the \'writhing mass\' of black insects covering a slice of raw meat that mesmerizes the disturbed lawyer in \'Ants Swarm.\'
Christian Kracht, Trans. by Daniel Bowles
PositiveBookforumYou don’t need to know classical Japanese theater for the unusual structure and tempo of The Dead to register, but Kracht decisively draws on Noh’s quirky structure—its tripartite form, with a meandering first part followed by a plot-quickening second and a swift resolution in the third. The novel is also inflected by its highly specific source history (especially the Mabuse-and-Murnau world of German cinema plumbed by Lotte Eisner and Siegfried Kracauer, both of whom are among the book’s significant characters) and its author’s penchant for meta-moments (the reader will eventually intuit that the text quite possibly coincides with a film titled The Dead) ... The Dead is marked by a deadpan archaizing style that in the original is frequently likened to a ventriloquized Thomas Mann ... The Dead is at times mildly and surprisingly humane ... The Dead shows the manifold ways that truism unites his characters’ sad sagas, as well as the medium that brings them back to life.
Helen Smith
Positive4ColumnsSmith’s book gives us a perspective on a time when the book industry was undergoing an earlier moment of what we would now call media disruption. As with the birth of the literary agent, which was also a phenomenon of the 1890s, positions like Garnett’s would become crucial as the business pivoted from books to, well, books, but quite unlike those published just a few years earlier … A formidable translator of Tolstoy, Dostoevesky, and Turgenev, Constance Garnett may have exerted as great an influence on the reading tastes of England as did Edward. In a biography otherwise alert to so much of what transpired around Edward, one wishes that Smith had given a more distinct sense of Constance … Smith demonstrates convincingly how Garnett’s instincts proved correct in case after case, from E.M. Forster to John Galsworthy to Arnold Bennett and Edward Thomas.
David Mitchell
MixedThe Los Angeles TimesMitchell's new book is more verbal calisthenics than structural gymnastics. It almost completely forgoes the first-person voice that Mitchell mastered in his prior work and limits itself to a short span of years (a nanosecond compared to the centuries-jumping Cloud Atlas) and a few locales in and off Japan … The narrative is pockmarked with too many meanwhile-back-at-the-temple leaps, and the thread shows too often when Mitchell tries to stitch together the book's set pieces and character studies. In his earlier books, the disconnect of stories across time and space were fascinatingly and proddingly jarring. Here, they're frequently just jarring. Which isn't to say that Thousand Autumns is a flop — far from it. When not tripping over the intricacies of its plot line, the novel features some of Mitchell's most luscious writing yet. For all the baroque movement of the story, the language is an exercise in extravagant control.
Dan Chaon
RaveBookforum...it quickly becomes clear to the reader just how oblivious Dustin is in buying into his own self-satisfying nostrums—so much so that the suspense of Ill Will seeps out a bit earlier than it might in a purer crime page-turner. Yet Chaon manages to maintain interest in Dustin with a handful of plots that rotate like the whirling lines in a hypnotist's pinwheel around a receding center ... What's sinisterly good about Ill Will is Chaon's audacity in teasing out the strands of his novel, enlisting vastly different yet somehow linked perspectives on a series of seemingly ritualized killings, separated by decades, as if they come from the far sides of a single unfinished jigsaw puzzle ... an especially bedeviling yet strangely despairing experience.
Pankaj Mishra
RaveBookforumMishra's ambitious tracing of the philosophical roots of global political outrage situates the current moment within the long history of ressentiment, the moralizing and self-righteous revenge of those without power ... If Mishra's philosophical net seems awfully wide, his long view of modernity and its discontents is also provocative, providing a broadly conceived idea of how the conditions of political outrage and its often aestheticized expression have developed over the past three hundred years ... Age of Anger is especially scornful of clash-of-civilizations theorists and West-versus-the-rest apologists, who see the political anger of the Middle East as confined to one part of the world ... The scope of Age of Anger is ambitious, and rather than an exacting account of intellectual history, it offers a kind of vast cultural portrait. The result is what is at once most fascinating and exasperating about Mishra's project: In fusing biography and historical survey his story vacillates between sweeping perspective and intimate detail, and the push and pull of long history and close-up viewpoint sometimes give the book a herky-jerky pace. Nevertheless, it's a brilliant work.
Frances Wilson
PositiveBookforumWilson, who navigates De Quincey’s work with a concision that is the polar opposite of her subject’s restless prolixity, observes that there have been plenty of biographies of De Quincey, but her aim in Guilty Thing is to present the first 'De Quinceyan biography' ... attends less to the deep play-by-play of De Quincey’s life than to the obsessions that consumed him ... perhaps attention is being redirected in a promising way. Frances Wilson’s book will play no small part in this sublimely pleasant development.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
PositiveBookforumAs Kirschenbaum’s history reminds us, the story of personal computers supplanting older systems dedicated to word processing—and writers’ larger commitment to abandoning pens and ink and typewriter ribbons and correction fluid—was hardly the fait accompli that we sometimes think it was. His book attempts a full literary history of this shift. To do so, he ranges across a number of phenomena: the technical and managerial prehistories of the word-processing revolution; the imaginative, sometimes allegorical literary responses to how work was managed...and most prominently, how word processing both tapped into and reflected writers’ anxieties about their whole enterprise.
