RaveThe Los Angeles TimesIt is neither passion nor homicide that makes Pamuk's latest, My Name Is Red, the rich and essential book that it is. While Pamuk's descriptions of the ravishing and ravenous Shekure quicken the heart, and his circuitous clues to the identity of the murderer quicken the mind, Pamuk is neither Jacqueline Susann nor Umberto Eco. It is Pamuk's rendering of the intense life of artists negotiating the devilishly sharp edge of Islam 1,000 years after its birth that elevates My Name Is Red to the rank of modern classic … Pamuk's Istanbul is a city trembling over a fault line of ideas. To read Pamuk is to be steeped in a paradox that precedes our modern-day feuds between secularism and fundamentalism … My Name Is Red, like the best historical novels, is a super-parable, a novel of our time.
Peter Carey
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesTrying hard to live a good life, Ned, like our best tragedians, is forced by the law–in the form of the Protestant English overseers–to turn to a life of crime. In the course of a story of wombat holes and kangaroo roasts, of men dressed as women and girls hard as men, of bar fights and Banshees and babies whose eyes change color, Ned fights for the rights of his oppressed co-religionists, the Irish poor with more babies than rats and fewer rights than water. He writes his story on the run from the law in the last weeks of his life, with no time for commas or periods, desperate to narrate the true story to a daughter he will never see. But more important, Ned wants the larger audience, the Australian people, to learn the truth about his persecuted people.
Jim Crace
RaveThe Los Angeles Times...an exquisitely gentle and unsentimental tale on the evolution of love … Crace weaves a story that ebbs and flows with a suggestion that, somewhere within the 30 years, between the original encounter and the final death, lies an explanation for the lives of these two students of animal behavior … It is entirely to Crace's credit that he narrates the evolution of Joseph and Celice with a tidal reluctance to move in any one direction for too long. None of the forces explain their final moments. Not even their chance return on a sunny day to the site of their first love provides a satisfying evolutionary link to the necessary chain of their lives. Their lives, it seems, are as simple and inexplicable as their deaths.
Michael Chabon
PositiveThe Los Angeles TimesFrom comic books to radio, The Escapist (and a host of companion titles) leads Kavalier & Clay to a life of comfort and the love of beautiful people. But life is hardly a brimming bowl of cherries for our heroes. In the midst of their success they do battle with the Aryan League and the vice squad. And of course Joe has a family back in Prague to avenge … Words are certainly the creative mud that runs through the veins of Chabon. A wonderfully lyrical writer, Chabon rattles off one elegiac list after another, paeans to the comic books that sustained Joe during his lean years after the war.
