About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Olga Tokarczuk
Rave The Spectator (UK) Mann played devil’s advocate between his debating patients, giving each of them a lavish allocation of pages. Tokarczuk is less indulgent, arguments crisply summarised. Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation is fluid and engaging ... There’s an almost Borgesian quality to the resolution. But remember, this is Tokarczuk. Nothing is ever quite as it seems.
Laurent Mauvignier, trans. by Daniel Levin Becker
Rave The Spectator (UK) Imagine a Stephen King thriller hijacked by Proust. Clammy-handed suspense, nerve-shredding tension, but related in serpentine, elegant prose, each climax held suspended – deferred gratification ... The Birthday Party explores memory, revenge and love tested to the limit. Mauvignier, a leading French writer and multiple prize-winner, is well served by Daniel Levin Becker’s graceful translation which perfectly captures the mesmerising rhythms and menace of this gripping psychological literary thriller.
Hanne Orstavik, tr. Martin Aitken
Rave The Spectator (UK) ... deceptively slim ... There are harrowing pages in Ti Amo. It is unflinchingly autobiographical ... Hanne Ørstavik is an award-winning Norwegian novelist, and the translation by Martin Aitken is perfectly pitched to capture the volatility of the narrator’s thoughts and the painful detachment she needs when she discovers her own life force remains undiminished ... Tender, anguished and truthful.
James Greer
Positive The Spectator (UK) Gleefully masquerading as an action thriller, it’s a wild trip through language, literature and translation, which may sound a bit niche, but Greer is out to persuade you that reading is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. He can be extremely funny on a 16th-century Biblical mistranslation, and throughout the book erudition jostles with wordplay. I gave up making page notes when they threatened to overwhelm the margins ... Greer spins a wonderfully complex web, with Nabokov lurking in the pattern. He enjoys teasing the reader and sows false information among the genuine ... definitely a novel with a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order ... Despite all the Brechtian alienation, the end is unexpectedly touching ... not for all; some might reject its self-referential brilliance. I’ll be rereading, for the fun of it. And the margin notes.
Ruth Ozeki
Positive The Spectator (UK) The world Ruth Ozeki creates in The Book of Form & Emptiness resembles one of the snow globes that pop up throughout the novel: a whirling chaos of objects and people ... The author has fun with both wokery and its opposite ... Different readers will read her book differently, some identifying with disaffected, teen-speaking Benny, others relishing the postmodernist fun. Or you can simply spin through the pages and enjoy the story ... About halfway through, the book falters under the weight of its ideas before arriving at a sweet but satisfying conclusion. Ozeki is a skilled storyteller and the journey she takes us on is deadpan hilarious, heart-touching and ultimately hopeful.
Tahmima Anam
Positive The Spectator (AUS) ... blessedly comic; a satire on the madness of tech tyranny, underpinned by a bitter-sweet feminist love story ... a highlight of Anam’s book is a mind-blowing startup offering interaction with your deceased loved ones. Ludicrous sci-fi? Hardly ... Tech geeks will read the book with knowing amusement; those of us floundering in the rarefied air will encounter baffling jargon and acronyms scattered like birdseed through the pages. But if you don’t know your CTOs from your IPOs or an elevator pitch from a vertical, forget the STEM and enjoy the novel as a witty predictive comedy of manners—until, with a stealthy nudge, Utopia’s future morphs into our present.
Kikuko Tsumura, trans. by Polly Barton
Positive The Spectator (UK) There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job gives us the minutiae of everyday working life — but not as we know it. Think Diary of a Nobody without the Pooterish self-regard. Or Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine , freed from lunchtime restrictions ... Tsumura has a sharp eye for the absurdities of white-collar admin, the solace of workplace friendships, the insidious anxieties, and the consoling siren lure of fast food (those Inarizushi parcels and jumbo manju sound irresistible), but the novel is feeling its way into deeper waters ... the novel’s surreal charm wins through, pointing up the looking-glass aspect of the narrator’s world: confronted by what she’s running away from, the fantastical and the ordinary become interchangeable, as she stumbles into what she’s really been searching for all along.
Kevin Barry
Positive The Spectator (UK) Shafts of high comedy have always distinguished Barry’s work, the swerve from grief into blessed laughter, devastating throwaway lines summing up a life or a failure. His knockout way to turn a sentence remains, but there are fewer laughs here; urban larks and verbals replaced by an undercurrent of sadness ... The lovely irony is that Barry himself is known very much for his glittering style — curlicued even. So is he sending himself up here? Or acknowledging a change of direction?
Javier Cercas, Trans. by Anne McLean
Positive The Spectator (UK) \"As in his earlier novel, Cercas is a slippery narrator, shifting in and out of the story, sometimes taking an overview with a documentary, almost forensic tone, at other times assuming the first person role of ‘Javier Cercas’ researching his family’s past — then pulling the rug from this conceit with post-modernist glee ... In search of the dead man, Cercas resurrects the past, drawing on records and personal testimony, at times guilty of information overload: details of battles won and lost weigh down some pages. But when it focuses on people, the book takes flight. It can be moving, unexpectedly funny, racy, demotic or deadpan. By the end there’s little that remains unknown about Mena, and there’s a sad irony to the achievement of heroic status: the family saw him as Achilles, the hero who gloriously died young. Cercas reminds us that when Odysseus, the wily survivor, visits the Underworld in the Odyssey, Achilles confesses he’d rather be a surviving penniless serf than lord of all the dead. So much for kalos thanatos.\
Javier Marias
Rave The Spectator The Infatuations is a metaphysical exploration masquerading as a murder mystery. The narrator, the widow and the best friend spend much of the book engaged in conversation, or imagined conversation, or recollected conversation, living simultaneously in a past both real and fantasy, tinged with nostalgia and regret, and a future imbued with suspicion and impossible hopes ... Between the interstices of the fragile plot of The Infatuations are disquisitions on life and death, freedom, the consequences of love, the impossibility of ever knowing another, and the role of fiction ... Along the way we get his immaculate prose and his sardonic view of the implacable nature of time.
Javier Marías Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa
Positive The Spectator Marías has said that he feels more at ease with his masculine characters; there is a hint of the male gaze in his work, possibly misogyny? Not this time: Berta, the desolate wife, is the heart of the story ... Throughout there’s a sense of an authorial mind dwelling on events and consequences...The elegant translation, once again by Margaret Jull Costa, is alive to every nuance ... I missed the wit and audacity of the earlier novels; the pace is leisurely, and after a marvellously tense opening sequence as the jaws of a trap slowly close on Tomàs, there’s little sense of danger. And his revelation of the life he has been leading seems anticlimactic. But we return to Berta for the last word; a complex, emotionally torn character, she evolves and matures, and her intimate story carries the book.
Alia Trabucco Zerán, Trans. by Sophie Hughes
Rave The Spectator You could call The Remainder a literary kaleidoscope: look at it one way and you see how the past lays a crippling hand on the generation that follows political catastrophe; shift the focus and you’re plunged into a darkly comic road trip ... Her spring-heeled prose moves lightly from lyrical to demotic, bawdy to elegiac. She brings the trio touchingly to life ... a soaring ecstasy that comes closer to anything I can recall to describing how it feels to fly like bird.