MixedThe BafflerSaunders’s procedure in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is straightforward ... He makes no attempt to teach the reader how to write fiction in any larger sense: novels go almost entirely unmentioned in the book, which makes the experience of reading it eerily similar to spending a few weeks in a fiction workshop ... But Saunders’s adoration of short stories cannot be chalked up to their mere manageability. He is a true believer in \'the form\' ... The audience that will get the most out of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is not made up of writers, but rather those who wish to become writers without having to do too much ... The trouble with A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is that Saunders’s relatability [...] Reading Saunders’s book feels akin to fully disassembling a set of Matryoshka dolls. Each nested layer is colorful, amusing in its way. But there at the end, you’re left with a stubby, unprepossessing figure: a reiteration of a fact you already know. Want to be a writer? Come up with a sentence. Write it down; frown at it; write it again. See? Easy.
Roberto Lovato
RaveThe Nation... a memoir that situates his family’s story within the broader history of what he dubs \'the tiny country of titanic sorrows,\' Lovato describes a personal awakening to El Salvador’s century-old cycle of violence, the process that prompted his turn to journalism as a means of grappling with the scale of the nation’s trauma ... Though his memoir is mostly concerned with the process of unearthing the experiences of violence that both he and his family (especially his father) suppressed throughout their lives, the book doubles as a journalistic bildungsroman ... Lovato’s journalism, then, is best understood as an expression of this process of unforgetting, and his work is a case study in the power that comes from a reporter deciding to write stories that speak to his own inner turmoil rather than adopting the studied dispassion typically ascribed to the profession ... If El Salvador is to emerge whole from its current fractured state, Lovato argues in Unforgetting, the nation must first stop ignoring its sinister and brutal history. He offers Pop’s process of unforgetting as a model. Admitting the reality of the horrors one has seen cannot make them go away, but airing them might, at least, create the space necessary for a departure from history to become possible.
