RaveThe New RepublicReflects [a] new consciousness ... Her increasing ambivalence about writing is detectable in Our Strangers—not because her prose is any less good, but because its fastidiousness now seems to culminate in ordinary everyday language. In her latest stories, she has made herself smaller, shifting her focus to networks, communities, and systems, the units which we will need to think in to change course collectively ... Davis puts her arch eye for humor on full display ... It is tempting to see the stories in Our Strangers as pieces written primarily to poke fun and entertain ... Davis writes that a person’s ultimate aim should be to \'feel small and still feel strong, and good\' ... By giving meticulous form to her singular sensibility, Our Strangers suggests that this fact does not have to annihilate meaning. Rather, it can be a wellspring for the wonderful and absurd.
J. M. Coetzee
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksRather than amounting to a blistering critique of the futility of making art, the novel proposes, from a new view, fresh uses for classic works of art ... If [Coetzee] remains preoccupied with unrequited feelings, in The Pole he moves beyond rendering the opacity of the beloved to suggest how love transforms the object of its desire. In return, he displays renewed reverence to the everyday ethical acts that, contrary to threatening the survival of classics, secure their place in history.
Elif Batuman
RaveChicago Review of BooksSelin is still doing what she did best in The Idiot: reacting to eclectic influences, in the form of keystones of Western literature ... That’s the first thing about Either/Or that made me gape with awe. Selin is a mean reader, though it doesn’t make her any less tender or humane. The novel is so iconoclastic that it reads like a tight-five standup set on the Western canon (except, of course, that it goes on for 350-odd pages). I laughed out loud repeatedly, reading her charmingly naive one-sentence ripostes to theories and books that have been the subject of bottomless grant funding, long dissertations, and whole careers ... When I was done with it, I passed the book from one friend to another, each of whom audibly cracked up reading every couple of pages, too ... Virtually every great insight in this book comes in this form: from a position of childlike alienation to the world ... Batuman shows us that this is what an identity and a life are: our relationships to what has been written before and society’s stories about itself. If this is true, then we begin to see how Selin’s imagination might one day grow to encompass the belief that \'the only way to live a free life is to strive constantly to free yourself and others.\' What could be more generous than this?
Olga Tokarczuk, Tr. Jennifer Croft
MixedChicago Review of BooksThe novel’s commanding yet elusive center-of-gravity, Jacob Frank, becomes the essential node holding this loose network together ... By the sheer proportions of the novel, every character—with the exception of Jacob himself—might be considered a minor character. Which ones stick depends utterly on the reader’s predilections ... The Books of Jacob...proffers a maximalist fictional world encompassing so much—so many people, languages, cultures, religions, artifacts, and events, over a stretch of time that reaches all the way up to the Holocaust—that it is only natural for the writer to become preoccupied with how to best narrate it all. The narrator, in such a world, becomes a curator whose task is to extract objects from the cabinet of curiosities that is history and to display them sensibly next to one another in a way that can induce thought, feeling, or revelation ... But the cosmology of the novel, or put another way, its narrative logic, is muddled by the narrator’s insistence on infinite recursion ... Jacob himself is impenetrable: the book’s characters zealously testify to his prophetic sway, but from the perspective of a historical reader who experiences him only through testimony, his charisma is enigmatic. He is not an empathetic character ... These narrators, with their blind spots and biases, are the people who inhabit this world, and reading a story told from their vantage points does not constrain us so much as it imbues us with the sense of investment that is synonymous with human experience. In The Books of Jacob, Tokarczuk is torn between her affection for the embroiled, partial, flawed kinfolk of the earth and her aspiration for a God-like omniscience, and the result is a narrator who refuses to admit that she’s narrating, situated in a position that is everywhere and nowhere.
Nancy Goldstone
PositiveBooklist... expert ... Goldstone employs colorful secondary-source accounts and strong, character-driven narration to present fresh insights into the personalities, attitudes, gifts, and fatal flaws of this family of powerful, now legendary women. Between her telling of Maria Theresa’s triumphant outmaneuvering of King Frederick of Prussia, a clandestine romantic relationship between Maria Christina and her sister-in-law, and the psychological unfitness of King Louis XVI for the throne, Goldstone weaves together a compelling and redefining tale of how character, decisions, and circumstance collided to shape modern Europe.
Egill Bjarnason
PositiveBooklistBjarnason’s chronicle is basically a greatest hits album of the past millennium of Icelandic history, which can occasionally feel cursory and prone to trivia. Yet this trivia is often fascinating. For readers who are curious about all things Icelandic, including how a \'cultural war\' is being waged over Iceland turning purple and why the letter Z was removed from the Icelandic language, this is the go-to book.
Edmund de Waal
PositivePloughsharesReading de Waal’s lines of inquiry makes the silence—indeed, the complete preclusion of the possibility of written response from Camondo—particularly haunting. Camondo’s non-response relegates de Waal’s attempts at intimacy mere one-sided projection. And there’s also a dramatic irony in the letters, the kind of dramatic irony of the Greek tragic sort which is rarely so poignant as it is when it is historical ... What de Waal can do as an archivist and descendant is rote and simple: he can bear witness to Camondo’s collectorship and life. Where de Waal ventures to do more, ascribing motives where there are only objects, he fails, rendering Camondo the man himself elusive and the objects overdetermined. We can confidently surmise that Camondo wished for people to enjoy his legacy: why else leave the entirety of his own legacy to the French nation? ... But in De Waal’s bearing witness, we see he is a brilliant interlocutor ... In this respect, the publication of de Waal’s private letters becomes a memorial to Moïse de Camondo, from one artist to another. In Letters to Camondo, De Waal pays homage to delicate, restrained elegance of good style, a kind of style that requires keen perception, artisanal knowledge, and sensitivity.
Edmund de Waal
RavePloughsharesWith meticulous and scientific precision, de Waal reports these objects to Camondo, almost as if to reassure him that his estate remains intact. He marvels at the collector’s knack for good style—inaccessible and vertiginous yet, in a word, impeccable ... Reading de Waal’s lines of inquiry makes the silence—indeed, the complete preclusion of the possibility of written response from Camondo—particularly haunting. Camondo’s non-response relegates de Waal’s attempts at intimacy mere one-sided projection. And there’s also a dramatic irony in the letters, the kind of dramatic irony of the Greek tragic sort which is rarely so poignant as it is when it is historical. Not long after Camondo’s death, the rest of his progeny—his daughter and his grandchildren—are killed at Auschwitz. De Waal factually and elegiacally relays the series of events that lead up to the deaths of Camondo’s daughter and her family ... the publication of de Waal’s private letters becomes a memorial to Moïse de Camondo, from one artist to another. In Letters to Camondo, De Waal pays homage to delicate, restrained elegance of good style, a kind of style that requires keen perception, artisanal knowledge, and sensitivity.
Kamel Daoud
PositiveChicago Review of BooksKamel Daoud’s second novel translated by Emma Ramadan, is maniacally concerned with questions of storytelling, meaning, and mortality ... Zabor is both blessed and cursed by his ability to save any person’s life by simply writing about that person ... Zabor’s notebooks might be filled with the level of mundane detail that practitioners like Marcel Proust and Karl Ove Knausgaard are famous for, with the noteworthy exception that Zabor writes about others, not himself.
Michelle Zauner
RaveHyphenA different kind of triangulation between a mother, a daughter, and food emerges: one in which food is not a mute, docile ornament (often much like the mother herself), but instead a rather lively contributor who loves, challenges, frustrates, and shows off in its own right. Zauner’s descriptions of food are delectable ... Her writing is dashed with conversational wit, humor and literary flair; it shows how food can be just as expressive as language ... Her mother’s dying days...are cataloged unflinchingly later in the book ... Zauner’s memoir fulfills her promise to ferment and transmute her mother’s life, thereby granting her a new one on the page ... Zauner accomplishes another kind of fermentation, too, combining common ingredients—love, grief, motherhood, Asian American identity, and food—and letting them react in a new, organic way.
Jhumpa Lahiri
PositiveAsymptoteSome of these sentences, granted, might log as overly simple and unsophisticated. Whereabouts is Lahiri’s first novel written in Italian and she took the further step of translating the novel into English herself ... At times Lahiri’s prose reads as stilted. She frequently strings together independent clauses with commas, contributing to the general impression of fragmentation and keeping readers an arm’s length away from the scene ... Lahiri’s commitment to writing solely in Italian often strikes people as monastic. But it begins to make sense in Whereabouts. In the same way that a considered estrangement from people and place can be necessary to reenchant a person’s relationship to the world, a radical refiguring of a person’s all-too-familial relationship to their native tongue can imbue life with new a artistic agency. Here is a writer who is serious about how life can be enriched by distances, silences, and the unfamiliar—not as a matter of self-denial but of life affirmation ... Lahiri’s novel evidences some of the fruits of solitude—pregnant language, remarkable attentiveness, and freedom.
