RaveBig IssueIt’s an unusual reading experience, to soak in 100 pages investigating beneficial methods of inhaling and exhaling, only be to violently pulled up by a ‘real life’ incident which puts everything you’ve just read into mocking perspective. But this is what Carrère excels at. He takes his reader on the same snaking, unpredictable journey he experiences himself, without the impression of contrivance or gimmickry. His prose is economical and forensic, yet it never feels clinical. Instead it is increasIngly hypnotic; lyrical, hypnotic and elegant. There is no doubt that a great intellect is at work, keen to explore the depths of his own troubled mind ... If this all sounds like a hifalutin misery memoir or a very dry kind of naval-gazing, rest assured; unlike that other well known chronicler of the self Karl Ove Knausgård, with whom he is often compared, Carrère is also a very funny writer who constantly seeks and finds joy.
Elizabeth Strout
RaveThe Big IssueStrout’s best novels are rich with deceptively slight little anecdotes which, to borrow an oddly appropriate boxing phrase, float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. Oh William! is no different, delivering its emotional gut-punches in the form of brief pop-up recollections and drive-thru memories; life as a series of pangs and blows ... Strout’s prose is notably unshowy, which might be why admiring fellow writers ask ‘How does she do it?’ How do her economical everyday sentences conjure scenes so familiar and true it feels like she’s stolen them from inside our heads? ... Strout is immensely insightful about the persistent impact of childhood and how even a past full of sadness and fear and loss can be hard missed. We move through her stories as we drift through our own lives, via moods and musings swerved by random gusts of music, banal recollections, a rush of de ja vu, a casual comment.
Colson Whitehead
PositiveThe Big Issue (UK)It’s not rippling with Paul Beatty or Joseph Heller belly laughs, but Harlem Shuffle is notably more playful than its heavyweight predecessors ... Along the way Whitehead documents the neighbourhood changes and losses with a nostalgic melancholy, walking the reader along the razed blocks, burnt-out shop fronts and faded street signs ... the real draw of this novel is its loving evocation of the sounds, smells and flavours of ‘60s Harlem ... Whitehead’s almost pathological need to thoroughly describe every passing jaywalker or shop window is akin to that of unlikely bedfellow Thomas Hardy ... We negotiate the ‘sidewalk choreography’ of men in pinstripe suits side-stepping soul-saving street preachers. And when it’s all over and we look up from the page again, the real world looks a little more grey than it did before.
Hanif Abdurraqib
RaveThe Big Issue (UK)... confirms that The Can’t Kill Us was no one-hit-wonder. The same keen intelligence, boyhood exuberance, thoughtful soul- searching and zinging wit are all happily present in these essays on dancing, singing, fighting, spying, electioneering, cinema, magic, card playing, going to the moon… you get the picture ... Abdurraqib’s trick, or rather natural knack, is to follow a train of thought that is most engaging when it wobbles, veers off-track and suddenly takes off like a more elegant Chitty Chitty Bang Bang ... Many of his subjects have been written about countless times but Abdurraqib’s unapologetically personal take on their lives is as compelling as a first-time encounter with a legend ... Abdurraqib is an affable, generous host whose company is always a pleasure.
