RaveThe Times (UK)A book drowned in wine and war and banquets and incest and pointless scholarship and bestiality and mire and grimy rural death ... Ambitious stuff, then. Sounds like improbable reading for pleasure, I grant you. But Énard is a writer of singular talent ... Here is the difficulty. This all sounds terrible. It sounds like a nightmare ... So how about this. Just buy it. Forget everything I’ve said.
Stephen May
PositiveThe Times (UK)The historical facts furnish May with a cast of legends to bring to life, and he does it with verve and humour ... The novel’s most clear success is not in this realm of historical insight (although the research is evident and well deployed), but in the cruel course of human events, a proxy war among the delegates that takes hold in the novel’s third and strongest act. May ensnares his characters in a net of intrigue that keeps the reader with him to the denouement — no mean feat since we all know what happened next.
Katherine Rundell
RaveFinancial Times (UK)This is the time-honoured trap of literary biography: great writing has a way of making fact superfluous. Rundell’s book, Super Infinite is half-biography, half \'act of evangelism\', and it slips the old snare with gorgeous ease. It is equal to its subject: a sensitive, witty, slim and abundant book. If it feels less like a biography, more like a series of flying essays ordered by chronology, so much the better ... Rundell is a writer who knows the quickest way home ... This is a remarkable book: one that flourishes and burgeons in the empty spaces of Donne’s life while still letting its subject speak for his many selves.
David Keenan
PositiveLiterary Review (UK)Xstabeth is not a lament but something altogether stranger ... Throughout Xstabeth, people act as though extraordinary things are normal. The narrator attends strip clubs with her father, travels to the unlikely destination of St Andrews, has an affair with a famous golfer and at one point sits on a toadstool in a fairy glade ... its internationalism, its track-stopping similes, its typographical pictograms (birds are drawn like this: ^.^, ~.~, «.»), its meta-fictional framework, its exaggerated sex scenes and its plot centred around a mysterious piece of art, this book bears the crisp boot print of Roberto Bolaño, less of an influence and more of an inhabiting spirit ... for all its peculiarity, it is one of the most interesting novels I’ve come across this year. Reading it, I felt the unmistakable pulse of something living, and it isn’t done with me yet.
Gulbahar Haitiwaji and Rozenn Morgat tr. Edward Gauvin
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)Gulbahar’s memoir is an indispensable account, which makes vivid the stench of fearful sweat in the cells, the newly built prison’s permanent reek of white paint. It closely corresponds with other witness statements, giving every indication of being very reliable. Most impressive is her psychological honesty.
Edmund White
PanThe Times (UK)White’s new novel is one of those outright catastrophes you can hardly believe made it off the editor’s desk. At once artless and affected, it rambles with mind-boggling carelessness between metafictional conceits and contradictory time-schemes before petering out altogether ... ends up like a circle jerk with one man in it ... Unfortunately, White makes little attempt to differentiate the two voices, which speak in paragraphs as aimlessly picaresque as the novel itself ... The back and forth is overwhelmed by the fustian Ruggero, with featureless Constance increasingly crowded out. What we do find out about Constance feels ham-fistedly contrived to provoke a younger (and better) generation of writers ... the dialogue is bad, the erotic writing is joyless, and the book is riddled with grammatical errors ... Elsewhere we find blunt inconsistencies ... Throughout this novel the author fails to do the basics. He can’t sustain a time scheme or a conceit, forgets his place, contradicts himself and changes tense for no reason. He seems to have lost all relish for language. He reserves his powers of observation and imaginative sympathy for himself. A Previous Life is a mess, and it badly needed an editor, but what it needed most of all was a writer.
Sarah Moss
PanThe Spectator (UK)\" It seems like one of those distanced dramas staged on Zoom: a four-hander, whose long passages of free-indirect discourse feel like monologue or soliloquy. Integrating word choice with subject and genre was once called the problem of ‘decorum’, and a certain verbal restraint holds here as well ... A touch of the fantastic does enter The Fell ... It’s the sole magical note in a novel that otherwise feels schematically conceived. After all, is this not the told and told again story of the past 18 months: a quarantined nation, someone in need and the emergency services coming to help them? In this case, it’s a broken leg and mountain rescue, not a breathless pensioner in hospital. Someone will write that other book eventually. For now though it’s all too recent, too pungently fresh in the mind.
Ai Weiwei, Trans. by Allan H. Barr
MixedThe Sunday Times (UK)If the book’s material is engrossing, its tone is strangely tepid. The richest passages come from childhood, and momentum slackens as we move from Ai’s apprenticeship as a young artist abroad, munching doughnuts by the bin fires of 1970s New York, to his life as a public figure in Nineties and Noughties China. Sometimes the text suffers from translationese ... The book’s later sections relay a remarkable series of public campaigns the artist led after he returned to China, as well as the gruelling detentions that make up the book’s climax. But much is missing: there is little mention of his personal life, and his descriptions of the art feel cursory. An account of taking 1,001 Chinese people to live temporarily in Germany for an artwork called Fairytale, comes and goes without a single anecdote. The passages about his wives — he married the first in America, separated, and remarried in China — are sparse and rare. In today’s China people can lose a lot through politically suspect connections: there may be other considerations at work here. What’s left is an artist’s veneration of his father, and his battle with the regime that has dominated both their lives. It’s a remarkable story. If I was Ai’s son, though, I’d still have a lot of questions.
David Storey
MixedThe Irish Times (IRE)I can’t necessarily recommend [Storey\'s] memoir, which he hesitated to publish during his profoundly troubled life. But I will certainly never forget it ... This certainly isn’t a misery memoir, but it is a memoir of misery. Storey’s light touch with characterisation and occasional, spectacular eloquence make it a mellifluous, if nothing like a pleasant, read. It is also a tale he has told himself many times. A Stinging Delight is strong on stinging, a little weaker on delight. Its author lived like a man tied naked in a ditch of nettles while someone shovelled dirt over his face, his life seeming at times to be little more than a half-century-long waterboarding.
Leila Slimani tr. Sam Taylor
RaveThe Times (UK)The Country of Others is a very different beast [than Slimani\'s previous books], a broader and better book than either of its predecessors ... As in the earlier novels [the characters] twist between need and repulsion, lust and hatred. What’s new about this book is the sense of a world beyond those passions, one that’s been realized with sympathy and skill ... This novel is maybe a bit short on humour. But it does impress with the depth of its moral imagination. It’s what you might, if you were feeling provocative, call a novel for adults: one that doesn’t grind axes, or preach, or tally up right and wrong, but simply explains that to know all isn’t necessarily to forgive all ... The Country of Others is a morally difficult, slow-burn story about lives being suffocated by circumstance, one that’s carried off with greater sympathy and realism than anything Slimani has done before.
Katie Kitamura
PanThe Times (UK)In a novel where we can barely shake hands without quietly contemplating the dynamics of structural power, a man with gelled hair might as well have ridden into town wearing a black hat and two bandoleers ... The dark-suited war criminals provide the book’s most compelling passages, exuding a terrible charisma ... The problem is the whole novel, told in limpid, deliberately monosyllabic prose, seems to be seen through a glass wall, the narrator floating on at Covid-secure distance from everything ... The evacuated personalities on show, to be sure, exemplify the unfathomable separateness of other human beings. If the book is about a woman’s journey into the paradoxes of intimacy, which she craves and fears, then, I guess, it makes sense that her account of the world should contain, or at least start from, a position of rejecting it. But what surprise can the author offer, when she makes no attempt to know the characters in the first place? How can you unearth things if you didn’t put down any earth to begin with? The story and its characters feel like a pretext for the elegant management of theme ... It’s not that I don’t agree with Kitamura about power, unknowability, the barbarism of men. It’s that, reading her book, I don’t feel it, don’t hear it or see it. The novel puts the reader into the position of its narrator, looking in through Perspex at a muffled world.
Joshua Cohen
RaveThe Times (UK)The Netanyahus is Cohen’s sixth novel, his most conventional and his best to date. It is a tour de force: compact, laugh-out-loud funny, the best new novel I’ve read this year ... Among its other merits, then, The Netanyahus can claim the distinction of being probably the funniest novel ever written about contending historiographies ... Cohen writes with humour and wit...but comedy is a way of seeing things, as well as describing them ... Cohen’s lesson, in this determinedly comic novel, is that history happens as farce and tragedy simultaneously; the side you see depends, in part, on where you happen to be standing.
Yan Lianke tr. Carlos Rojas
PositiveThe Times (UK)... a difficult but fascinating work, a novel in which the reader is constantly urged to measure the discrepancy between what’s being said and what’s happening ... The fretful reader is left to shadowbox with their own preconceptions ... Jonathan Swift said satire is a mirror in which we see everyone’s features but our own. Some will be eager to see the faces of their ideological foes in the brainwashed features of the star-crossed revolutionaries — their pitiless self-advancement and disregard for those who stand in their way. It’s easy to look at insanity and see everyone else. Yan’s challenge, to his samizdat readers in China and those beyond, is to look in the murky glass of ambition and self-deception and find the face that resembles their own.
Judy Batalion
PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)... a conscious attempt to restore that missing page ... [a] sometimes dizzying cast of characters ... Batalion writes history that seeks to emphasise the agency and resistance of the human spirit in the face of oppression ... Batalion’s book is passionately researched and written with the quick-cutting thrust of an action film. (Steven Spielberg is developing it for the screen). If it has a flaw, it’s that at times her characters feel too much like one woman. They have a saintly, faceless quality, and though I read this book in awe of their heroism, I finished it having never quite met their eyes.
