PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe higgledy-piggledy provenance of these pieces—The Sewanee Review, two book introductions...an address to the 2004 graduates of Colby College and so forth—might make you think you’re about to dig into a smorgasbord of frozen leftovers. But it turns out that Russo the nonfiction writer is a lot like Russo the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. He is affably disagreeable, wry, idiosyncratic, vulnerably bighearted, a craftsman of lubricated sentences. In the end, you almost always want Russo to go on ... That said ... Russo’s graduation speech is better than most such peppy pensées aimed at the yet-to-be employed, but it hardly exceeds the limits of the genre. Neither does his look at The Pickwick Papers, which (unlike his rounded introduction on Twain) is written in a professorial shorthand that might make you feel like a student who didn’t complete the reading assignment ... Perhaps what’s most admirable about these essays is their genial and searching tone. In this know-it-all age of thought-leader messiahs and thumb-taunting Twitter Torquemadas, Russo places his faith in the ideals of art—ambiguity, paradox, heresy, the sublime—over the black-and-white ideologies of our current politics. Leave it to a fiction writer to remind us that the world is, more often than not, stubbornly subjective.
Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel & Ted Goossen
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe melancholy soufflé Murakami whips up in these pages is decidedly masculine, a rainy Tokyo of unfaithful women, neat single malt, stray cats, cool cars and classic jazz played on hi-fi setup ... Like such philosophically head-scratching aphorisms, these stories — part allegory, part myth, part magic realism, part Philip Marlowe, private eye — are sometimes confusing even to those who narrate them ... [a] slim but beguilingly irresistible book. Like a lost lover, it holds on tight long after the affair is over.
