PositiveNew York Review of BooksIn some ways her most stylistically realist work ... The characters in Seven Empty Houses are all haunted by a sense of unease, an anxiety often about class that sets in as soon as they leave their homes ... With an austere yet intense style, Schweblin unravels her characters’ dark psyches and the unheimlich quality of their intricate domesticity.
Camila Sosa Villada tr. Kit Maude
PositiveAstra[Sosa Villada] has a sharp, baroque prose style that both romanticizes this form of sisterhood and is suffused with uncanny scenes of violence. Translated elegantly by Kit Maude, the syntax of Bad Girls is inflicted with an elegiac tone and an epic sensitivity conducive to self-mythology — to the point, sometimes, of overly romanticizing the world that it inhabits. Formally, Sosa Villada creates a landscape that reaches luminous peaks, which makes it particularly frustrating when, on occasion, she fails to deliver ... a generational testimony as well as a personal one. It imagines a future and exorcises a past, being exceptional for what it promises and for the portrait of a life it leaves behind.
Yoko Tawada, tr. Margaret Mitsutani
RaveBookforumTawada inhabits many tongues with ease and playfulness, although not without anxiety. Her work often shows concerns about the state of the Japanese language in a world where everything seems to be rapidly shifting toward English ... Tawada’s satirical tone and flirtation with sci-fi are intensely original, but these questions of assimilation vis-à-vis tradition are not completely out of line with current conversations in Japanese literature ... For Tawada, language carries a specific form of memory and sense of belonging, which, in the face of atomization, becomes fraught and melancholic all at once. As the world becomes more interconnected and exophony becomes an excruciatingly contemporary condition, Tawada’s sci-fi becomes a recognizable parable for writers in exile or living abroad. Scattered All Over the Earth relies on the affect and importance of a mother tongue and, in the same movement, suggests that this is also form of fiction. It is then turned into an invention, a translation of something else, hovering between the purity of the kotodama and the sinfulness of the multilingual. The truly productive space, where Tawada displays all the force of her potential as a novelist, lies in the uncomfortable in-between.
Clarice Lispector, tr. Stefan Tobler
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books...masterfully translated ... the book advances at its own pace, in a series of encounters that overlapping with long, poetic passages in which Lóri reflects on her own existence ... Lóri feasts vampirically on the apparent wisdom of Ulisses. Her movements as a young émigré in Rio, like those of many of Lispector’s characters, follow a logic of intellectual curiosity ... If you choose to read the works of Taubes and Lispector, you should do it with a helmet on ... Books like Divorcing and An Apprenticeship offer unresolved, sometimes frustrating narratives that, like the relationships depicted in their pages, demand more from us than they seem willing to give in return.
