‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Tabitha Stanmore

Positive The New York Times Book Review Spirited and richly detailed ... With hundreds of colorful incidents drawn from legal records, court chronicles and contemporary accounts, Stanmore hopscotches through history ... One limitation of this lively book, acknowledged by its author, is that it’s hard to quantify how many of the cunning folk’s bread-twirlings, spells and gewgaws produced the desired results.

Barbara Weisberg

Rave The New York Times Book Review Riveting ... Weisberg reassembles the story with the clear determination to treat both sides equally, and without leering ... She cloaks the jagged facts of the case in the soft trappings of their social backdrop to soften their impact. Nevertheless, sharp edges pierce the velvet veil ... By letting public and private records reanimate this vivid chapter of the past, Weisberg tells a story that fiction could not touch.

Jhumpa Lahiri, trans. by Todd Portnowitz

Positive The Wall Street Journal Each narrative contains deftly drawn vignettes of the entwined lives of Italians and foreigners of different classes, colors, ages and creeds. Her characters seek purchase on Rome’s stone streets, bridges, piazzas and walls ... The stones of Ms. Lahiri’s Rome may resist roots, but they shape lives.

Jonathan Miles

Rave The New York Times Book Review Reading this breathtaking account of the transformations of the French Riviera over the last two millenniums is like riding shotgun with a racecar driver in the Monaco Grand Prix ... Elegiac.

Nancy Marie Brown

Rave The New York Times Book Review Even confirmed skeptics are likely to come away from this deeply mined literary, sociological and philosophical excavation of Iceland’s heritage with a new appreciation of the place the huldufólk occupy in the country’s identity, and of the role that similar spirits once served for ordinary people across the globe ... Brown overlays a glowing web of connections on Iceland’s folkloric — and literal — landscape of ice and fire, illuminating the answers to the many questions she poses. Her passionate defense of the huldufólk would gratify the most sensitive elf. Following the successful opposition to the Galgahraun road, Jonsdottir dubbed herself the elves’ \'speaker in the human world.\' In Brown, they have found another.

Marina Warner

Rave Wall Street Journal [Warner] went on a treasure hunt, mining a dragon’s trove of letters, diaries, photographs, newspaper clippings, clothes and other relics that retained talismanic force ... In the book, taking up these artifacts, she sets them amid other touchstones, vividly incarnating not only her parents but the rich historical, political and cultural tapestry they inhabited ... Her words are her lamp; and her restoration of her parents’ story is a ravishment, unforgettable, illuminating ... With Esmond and Ilia, her memoir-cum-fable of the hoopoe and the porpoise, Ms. Warner has reopened the window that slammed down so abruptly on her childhood’s golden age, and let the light back in.

Werner Herzog, trans. by Michael Hofmann

Positive The New York Times Book Review This long-steeped book distills their conversations into a potent, vaporous fever dream; a meditation on truth, lie, illusion and time that floats like an aromatic haze through Herzog’s vivid reconstruction of Onoda’s war ... Herzog presents a kind of dual libretto to the operas both men conducted in their different jungles. They worked on different continents, in different eras and to different ends, but they served the same inexorable impulse: to lead a life of archetype in the modern day, outside of time, eternal.

Bernd Brunner, tr. by Jefferson Chase

Rave The New York Time Book Review In 31 chapters, each as self-contained and pointed as a shard of ice, Brunner presents a different historic, political, natural or cultural facet of his subject. Together, these shards form a glacial memory palace-cum-climbing wall that lets readers scale this myth-wreathed territory. He looks not so much for a through-line as for arresting spots on the berg of the notional north where the reader can plant an ice ax, pause for breath, look out and down, and ponder the mysteries of the northern lights, spread out across the centuries ... Thought-provoking and wide-ranging, Extreme North resembles the \'cabinet of wonders\' that he uses as the book’s embarkation point: the 16th-century Museum Wormianum, which held thousands of northern relics assembled by a Copenhagen polymath named Olaf Worms.

Sofi Oksanen, Tr. Owen Frederick Witesman

Positive The Wall Street Journal \"Oksanen...blows her protagonist’s cover from the first page; but this is no spoiler. What she uncovers remains enigmatic and unprovable not only for the reader, but for Olenka herself, for whom every answer yields a new question, a new source of misgiving ... Ms. Oksanen mines living history, digging up toxic societal elements that have explosive power ... Ms. Oksanen wants her readers to feel uncertain and out of place, as adrift as her protagonist, and as complicit. She forges the links of her story with stealth and delay, slipping them into overlapping scenes in unnumbered chapters ... She postpones for as long as possible the moment when the links join to form the chain of circumstances that coils around her characters. But even then, the chain slithers, eludes the grasp ... The slow build and devious plotting of Dog Park will tantalize the Rubik’s Cube-minded, and the book offers the retrospective satisfaction of infinite replay, like a game with multiple resolutions. \

Alice Zeniter, Tr. by Frank Wynne

Rave The Wall Street Journal Zeniter has used fiction to demystify the war, its evolution and its fallout through an enthralling saga of three generations of a family from Algeria’s mountainous Kabylia region who left the country in 1962 and moved to France ... Ms. Zeniter’s extraordinary achievement is to transform a complicated conflict into a compelling family chronicle, rich in visual detail and lustrous in language. Her storytelling, splendidly translated by Frank Wynne, carries the reader through different generations, cities, cultures, and mindsets without breaking its spell ... Ms. Zeniter shows fiction’s power as a hedge against loss of the past: the art of regaining.

Jill Wine-Banks

Positive Air Mail Wine-Banks not only brings to life the urgency of the Watergate years in vivid detail and color (including the clothes), and with a blow-by-blow delivery that makes the chronology easy to follow; she reveals her own personal and professional struggle with sexism, both at home and in the workplace. Through her own example, she reminds the reader of the obstacles that women of her era had to overcome to make progress for themselves and for the next generation—progress which, like an honorable White House, cannot be taken for granted, and can be lost if not staunchly defended.

Eleanor Fitzsimons

Mixed The New York Times Book Review Fitzsimons evidently assumes you already know most...things [about Nesbit]. Taking her subject as a known quantity, she opens her book with a sentimental description of a lurid incident from Nesbit’s childhood that haunted the author for the rest of her life ... Fitzsimons...shows less interest in rhapsodizing over Nesbit’s style than in exploring the purpose and personal history that underlay it ... Nesbit’s child characters...\'reflect the Fabian belief that socialism transcends class since it benefits everyone.\' The Bastables, the Psammead children and the railway children put that belief into action in their fictional lives. But did Nesbit do so in her real one? Fitzsimons explores this question thoroughly ... In her biography, Fitzsimons handily reassembles the hundreds of intricate, idiosyncratic parts of the miraculous E. Nesbit machine; but the secret of how she made it all come together and hum remains intact.

Min Jin Lee

Rave The New York Times Book Review ... accomplished and engrossing ... an energetic eventfulness and a sprawling cast that call to mind the literary classics of Victorian England ... unmassaged portrayal of present realities emerge in Lee’s ambitious book ... It would be remarkable if she had simply written a long novel that was as easy to devour as a 19th-century romance...But Lee intensifies her drama by setting it against an unfamiliar backdrop: the tightly knit social world of Korean immigrants, whose children strive to blend into their American foreground without clashing with their distinctive background. It’s a feat of coordination and contrast that could kill a chameleon, but Lee pulls it off with conviction ... crosses cultural lines: its heartache is universal.

Roberto Bolano, Trans. by Natasha Wimmer

Positive The New York Times Book Review \"... Natasha Wimmer’s [translation is] superb ... With words alone, Bolaño summons a visual world, creating in this book, as in his others, what Mario Vargas Llosa has called \'images and fantasies for posterity\' ... The Spirit of Science Fiction serves as a key to Bolaño’s later work, unlocking clues to his abiding obsessions ... [The book] is not unripe juvenilia; it is a hardy forerunner that stands on its own.\

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Rave The New York Times Book Review \"With intricacy and humor, Van der Vliet Oloomi relays Zebra’s brainy, benighted struggles as a tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bolaño and Borges. In her first novel, Fra Keeler, a psychological thriller about a man who buys a house and is obsessed with the circumstances of the previous owner’s death, she showed similar acuity and dark wit; here, however, she immeasurably expands her terrain. Literature, as Zebra’s father has observed, is \'a nation without boundaries\' and for this high-minded heroine, \'landscape and literature are entwined like the helix of DNA.\' But the pilgrimage she undertakes in Call Me Zebra teaches her to raise her eyes and register the reality of the people who exist in her present, not just those who survive in the pages of her past.\

Tom McCarthy

Rave The New York Times Sunday Book Review McCarthy’s superb stylistic control and uncanny imagination transport this novel beyond the borders of science fiction. His bleak humor, hauntingly affectless narrator and methodical expansion on his theme make Remainder more than an entertaining brain-teaser: it’s a work of novelistic philosophy, as disturbing as it is funny. McCarthy shows that philosophy, like history, can repeat itself as farce. And in this farce, the slamming doors swing shut in slo-mo, reopening only to slowly close yet again.

Michael Ondaatje

Rave The New York Times Sunday Book Review In The Cat’s Table, Ondaatje seems to lead the reader on a journey through three deeply submerged weeks in his own memory … So convincing is Ondaatje’s evocation of his narrator’s experience that the reader could easily mistake it for the author’s own. But in a note at the end of the book Ondaatje takes pains to establish that The Cat’s Table is ‘fictional,’ though it ‘sometimes uses the coloring and locations of memoir and autobiography.’ This disclaimer will not keep the reader from reflecting that any life so richly recounted belongs more to fiction than fact … Not all the mysteries Ondaatje explores in his account of Mynah’s sea passage — revisited in adulthood from the remove of decades and from another continent — have clear resolutions, nor do they need them. Uncertainty, Ondaatje shows, is the unavoidable human condition, the gel that changes the light on the lens, altering but not spoiling the image.

Masha Gessen

Rave The Barnes & Noble Review ...a magisterial, panoramic overview of Russia under Putin ... While the people she singles out are often vociferous opponents of the rearward direction of the New Russia, she gives at least equal time to the group the perestroika historian Yuri Afanasyev dubbed 'the aggressively obedient majority' and to the tens of millions of ordinary Russians who would be happy to go back to the USSR, more or less ... The characters’ personal histories add life and nuance to Gessen’s narrative. But it takes a while to get a handle on all of the players, who are as numerous as the cast of a Tolstoy novel, if less romantically clad. But portraying the politics of totalitarianism does not call for a romantic filter. Gessen’s reconstruction of the ongoing saga of Russia’s reversion to vozhdizm makes for thrilling and necessary reading for those who seek to understand the path to suppression of individual freedoms, and who recognize that this path can be imposed on any nation that lacks the vigilance to avert it.

Thomas Pynchon

Rave The Barnes & Noble Review In his futuristic (recent) present, at a time when New Yorkers are still recovering from the bursting of the dot-com bubble, anyone who has access to a computer screen and knows where to look can find refuge from the post-tech-boom doldrums in a parallel digital universe called ‘DeepArcher’ (get it?), and secede from ‘meatspace’ reality…with or without doing what we once thought of as dying … The future that he so precociously, disturbingly foresaw long ago now surges around us. With Bleeding Edge, he shows that he has mastered the move from the shock of the new to the shock of the now, while cushioning the blow. If Maxi, in the post-9/11 world, keeps finding it ‘harder to tell ‘real’ NYC from translations’ and ‘keeps getting caught in a vortex taking her farther each time into the virtual world,’ she is not alone. Pynchon throws her, and us, a rope.

Amor Towles

Rave The New York Times Sunday Book Review With this snappy period piece, Towles resurrects the cinematic black-and-white Manhattan of the golden age of screwball comedy, gal-pal camaraderie and romantic mischief (think of Stage Door, Made for Each Other, My Man Godfrey and even Fay Wray in King Kong). With Katey, we travel by cab and watch Broadway ‘slipping by the windows like a string of lights being pulled off a Christmas tree,’ or see limousines idling in front of the 21 Club, smoke spiraling from their tailpipes ‘like genies from a bottle.’ These pages prompt recollections of movie scenes stamped so deeply on the psyche that they feel remembered: elevated trains, Carole Lombard and Jimmy Stewart, smoky jazz clubs and men in fedoras … Towles’s central characters are youthful Americans in tricky times, trying to create authentic lives, even if quasi-pseudonymously. ‘In New York City,’ he writes, ‘these sorts of alterations come free of charge.’

Rachel Seiffert

Rave The New York Times Book Review Her new novel’s inclusive, impartial vision awakens a contemporary reader’s conscience by highlighting the individual’s role in collective error: 'How we respond when a principle is at stake' ... Seiffert favors a spare, unexaggerated style. You sense in her a firm resistance to overplaying pathos, even when tragedy is her underlying subject. The power of her writing comes not from emotional manipulation or verbal fireworks but from her marshaling of the sort of visual detail that makes her settings feel almost tangible, and from the bonds she builds between her wary characters, who, like it or not, must accept their need for one another ... While retaining the muscularity that has always distinguished her prose, she has allowed these disparate portraits to migrate and meld, producing one interactive, consolidating vision ... Seiffert has unleashed literature’s unique power to analyze history’s scroll, to let fiction judge.

Anne Enright

Rave The New York Times Sunday Book Review In a word: heavy. Or so you might think. But in this mystery of past causes, the transformative power of Enright’s language keeps the story’s freight from burdening the reader. Veronica’s reminiscences have an incantatory power that makes them not depressing but enthralling … Enright hides her painterly brushstrokes. The Gathering still casts fiction’s spell, but its detours from reality are surreal, not unreal: nothing happens that could not happen, that has not happened, to somebody. Bringing together the skills she has honed along the way, Enright carries off her illusions without props or dei ex machina, bravely engaging with the carnival horrors of everyday life. As Veronica struggles to understand her brother’s suicide, she tells herself that she owes it to Liam to acknowledge his past, their past, without flinching.

Barbara Kingsolver

Rave The New York Times Sunday Book Review How can the experiences of a fictional loner merge with those of larger-than-life figures who played a pivotal role in world politics? And what can readers learn from their intersection? Those are the questions answered by this dazzling novel, which plunges into Shepherd’s notebooks to dredge up not only the perceptions they conceal but also a history larger than his own, touching on everything from Trotskyism, Stalinism and the Red scare to racism, mass hysteria and the media’s intrusion into personal and national affair … The Lacuna can be enjoyed sheerly for the music of its passages on nature, archaeology, food and friendship; or for its portraits of real and invented people; or for its harmonious choir of voices. But the fuller value of Kingsolver’s novel lies in its call to conscience and connection. She has mined Shepherd’s richly imagined history to create a tableau vivant of epochs and people that time has transformed almost past recognition.

Pascal Mercier, Translated by Barbara Harshav

Mixed The New York Times Book Review ...Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon delves into the question of national and personal identity, contains a text within a novel and explicitly invokes the tale of Odysseus and his 20-year journey through pain toward self-knowledge ... Mercier has built his plot on escapist fantasy, and put the Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar’s authoritarian regime at the core of his inquiry ... Mercier’s hero is a dried-up Swiss classics teacher, Raimund (Mundus) Gregorius, whose late-life crisis begins when he encounters a distraught Portuguese woman on a bridge in Bern. Ditching his classroom, Gregorius takes off for Lisbon...wording is so dense and overwrought, and Barbara Harshav’s translation so ham-handed, that unpacking each sentence is like decoding a cryptic crossword in hieroglyphs ...struggles with the philosophical task of creating an authentic self in the absence of available role models.

Julian Barnes

Rave The New York Times Sunday Book Review ...a mystery of memory and missed opportunity … Tony’s tragedy, ‘if this isn’t too grand a word,’ is that he avoids deep connection rather than embracing it, for fear of risking its loss … Barnes’s unreliable narrator is a mystery to himself, which makes the novel one unbroken, sizzling, satisfying fuse. Its puzzle of past causes is decoded by a man who is himself a puzzle. Tony resembles the people he fears, ‘whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost,’ and who wound others with a hypersensitivity that is insensitive to anything but their own needs.

Claire Messud

Rave The New York Times Sunday Book Review It’s exhilarating to encounter such unrestrained vehemence in a work by this controlled, intellectual author. Messud’s previous novels, albeit extraordinarily intelligent and well-crafted, are characterized by rationed or distant emotion. The Woman Upstairs is utterly different — its language urgent, its conflicts outsize and unmooring, its mood incendiary. This psychologically charged story feels like a liberation … In this ingenious, disquieting novel, she has assembled an intricate puzzle of self-belief and self-doubt, showing the peril of seeking your own image in someone else’s distorted mirror — or even, sometimes, in your own.

Jojo Moyes

Positive The New York Times Book Review ...unlike other novels that have achieved their mood-melting powers through calculated infusions of treacle — Erich Segal’s Love Story comes immediately to mind — Moyes’s story provokes tears that are redemptive, the opposite of gratuitous ... Me Before You is a love story and a family story, but above all it’s a story of the bravery and sustained effort needed to redirect the path of a life once it’s been pushed off course ... At the novel’s outset, the prospects for this appear bleak. With his rudeness and his fits of temper, Will resembles Charlotte Brontë’s Mr. Rochester, albeit in a wheelchair...Louisa Clark is no Jane Eyre, even if, like Brontë’s heroine, she is small, dark-haired and unprepossessing ... Her language is never lofty; she exposes her characters’ flaws with the literary equivalent of a fluorescent bulb’s naked light. The matter-of-fact language of Lou and Will’s conversations and thoughts, and the starkness of their surroundings ... This is a love story that’s eloquent not so much in its delivery as in its humanity ... Lou and Will she has created an affair to remember.

Téa Obreht

Rave The New York Times Sunday Book Review With fables and allegories, as well as events borrowed from the headlines, [Obreht] illustrates the complexities of Balkan history, unearthing patterns of suspicion, superstition and everyday violence that pervade the region even in times of peace. Reaching back to World War II, and then to wars that came before, she reveals the continuity beneath the clangor … Ingeniously, Obreht juxtaposes Natalia’s matter-of-fact narration with contemporary folk tales that are as simple, enthralling and sometimes brutal as fables by Kipling or Dinesen … Filled with astonishing immediacy and presence, fleshed out with detail that seems firsthand, The Tiger’s Wife is all the more remarkable for being the product not of observation but of imagination.

Colm Tóibín

Rave The New York Times Sunday Book Review America is peopled, for the most part, by the descendants of immigrants who had the resolve, the daring and the detachment to leave behind the places and people they had formerly known. But Eilis isn’t such a person; detachment isn’t part of her makeup. It has been thrust on her by women who are as attached to home and family as she is … In tracking the experience, at the remove of half a century, of a girl as unsophisticated and simple as Eilis — a girl who permits herself no extremes of temperament, who accords herself no right to self-assertion — Tóibín exercises sustained subtlety and touching respect. He shows no condescension for Eilis’s passivity but records her cautious adventures matter-of-factly, as if she were writing them herself in her journal.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Rave The Barnes & Noble Review Devastating, unjudgmental, and curiously uplifting, the memoir is a profound testament to the power of the creative, loving human spirit to vanquish brutal circumstance ... the stories she tells of her motherless days in Kuibyshev are not cast down; they show a girl of unerodable pride and defiant character, intent on finding joy ... A Moscow court 'rehabilitated' Petrushevskaya’s family long ago; but her memoir moots the original charges, indicting nothing but history. The bard has filled in the glowing page.

George Saunders

Rave The Barnes & Noble Review Rarely has a novel about the dead felt so thrillingly, achingly, alive ... he has devised a richly hybrid work that defies easy categorization. Chapters of whirligigging dialogue between the cemetery denizens are interleaved with chapters holding excerpts from news accounts, biographies, memoirs, and diaries of the era (many actual, many invented), which ballast the fantasy with the gravitas of real occurrence ... A philosophical principle runs throughout Saunders’ novel that keeps the engine of his story spinning. That principle is that even the most private tragedy plays an integral part in the natural order.

Michael Chabon

Rave The Barnes & Noble Review ...the DNA of his storytelling is not only literary, it is literal. Moonglow relays the rich, complicated history of the author’s own family, reshaped through fiction ... This superb novel shows Chabon at his best; his documentary impulse here reins in the ornate language that can sometimes make his other work gaudy. He loses none of his audacious agency by harnessing his art to biography. But is Moonglow fundamentally a novel, or a memoir? Why quibble? As every novelist knows, it’s in fiction that the important truths get told.

Nathan Hill

Rave The Barnes & Noble Review Not since the 1996 and 1997 double-header of John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral has a novel emerged that presents a more comprehensive and perceptive portrait of the personal and political American psyche than Nathan Hill’s wise, rueful, and scathingly funny début.

Tracy Tynan

Positive The New York Times ...she does not end her memoir with the neat seam of her own fulfillment. Instead, she shows how time and chance stitched together and remade the family her parents left in tatters ... As you read, you marvel at the author’s resilience; the girl with the apple-green shoes acceded to a bigger role than she had ever expected, and found that she knew how to dress the part.

Laura Claridge

Positive The New York Times Book Review If you’ve ever struggled with the task of composing a guest list for the ultimate fantasy dinner party, Laura Claridge’s biography of Blanche Knopf (née Wolf) will show you whom to put at the head of your table. That dream guest is, of course, Claridge’s subject: the petite, intense and, as Robert Gottlieb once put it, 'fierce and exigent' co-founder of the great literary publishing house Alfred A. Knopf.

Shawn Vestal

Rave The Barnes & Noble Review [Vestal's] evocation of Loretta’s mind-set shows astonishing perception. Other writers, even female writers, often exaggerate the sensuality of young girls, overplaying their naiveté and sentimentality and diminishing their agency. Vestal understands that a girl like Loretta can be innocent and shrewd at the same time; that her desire and self-control are mutable and can be directed by her, depending on circumstance. He captures Loretta’s protean quality so well that it may disconcert some readers who are not used to seeing the young female psyche so unhypocritically laid bare...In Daredevils, Vestal sends his characters soaring across the gulf that separates the identity that confines them and the identity they would choose, letting them land roughly but firmly on the other side, broken but free.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Rave The Barnes & Noble Review The thrill of tracking Lahiri’s stubborn, headlong adventure gains additional intensity when you read her in Italian, absorbing her mind’s embrace of the language. Her potent, mellifluous use of the language, sparing but evocative, shows that she no longer has the slightest cause for embarrassment ... The style of In Other Words is more direct, more personal, and less pruned than in Lahiri’s guarded, stately fiction. And yet, her individual stamp remains.

Sunil Yapa

Rave The Christian Science Monitor ...demonstrates the great advantage that fiction has over journalism: the freedom to establish the facts, after the fact, and to set them in a context deepened by hindsight.... [a] remarkable, engrossing novel.

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November 22, 2024