Marguerite Duras, Trans. by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan
PositiveBOMBThese pointedly uneven essays, ranging from 350 words to more than seventy pages, are full of silences and contradictions, leaping between politics, memory, literature, fashion, and art. If Balzac’s densely described universe leaves the reader immobilized in place, Duras requires a different form of submission: one that is active, necessitating constant voluntary consent ... As the writer of this review, I feel keenly aware that the act of trying to apply a cohesive reading to her essays is an experiment she would find inherently displeasing...But describing her work feels as impossible as winning a battle against a rising sea. There is nothing to do but to give in to it. But, of course, fragility comes with its own power. It makes its demands upon its handler, or else it willfully shatters beneath you.
Anne Boyer
RaveBOMBThe essays in this book model the poet’s no: they refuse to make things easy when they aren’t, preserving the messy difficulty of cancer, of poverty, of staying alive under capitalism ... Boyer creates a taxonomy of refusal, tracing its lineage through the geography of Kansas City, the economies of illness, the incarnations of lust, and the music of Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, and Mary J. Blige ... The essays are, like most good and true things, equal parts painful and funny, and never more so than when confronting the commodification of the body, heart, and language ... Reading these essays, I was reminded of the origin of the word essay, which, as Montaigne tells us, means to try. Boyer’s pieces are essays in the purest sense of the word. They are brave in their attempts to refuse the promises, words, and visions of the world as it is, and instead, to attempt to demand a better one.
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
RaveThe RumpusMarzano-Lesnevich merges her reportorial and novelistic impulses into a book that bursts with empathy and finely researched detail. With elegant and lyrical prose, she investigates her childhood with the same scrutiny that she uses to research her subject, a man charged with murder, and renders his biography as thoughtfully as her own. What emerges is part memoir, part reportage, and part fiction … The premise of using a child molester and murderer to offset a personal story would be dangerous in the hands of a lesser writer. What saves this book from becoming exploitative is the concern that Marzano-Lesnevich has for her subjects … There is a moral dimension to Marzano-Lesnevich’s project. In one sense, she subscribes to a psychoanalytic model that suggests a powerful force must be spoken and acknowledged for its power to be diminished.
