RaveZYZZYVALennon has an artful ability to place his readers in the exact position as his narrator: a state of complete unknowing. We similarly enter the novel unsure of where we are, where we are going, and why we are even here in the first place. Like the puzzle in the guesthouse, we are missing the bigger picture—the box that shows us the final image ... Lennon drops small hints and clues as to the narrator’s backstory, and gradually makes familiar the new world we are in ... But Lennon does not disclose every one of his secrets; not everything can be explained away. He leaves just enough unresolved to keep us wondering. Strange and subtle, disconcerting and delightful, Subdivision proves a masterful mystery until its very end.
John Banville
RaveThe Stanford DailyBanville’s characters — the cast of suspects, per se — each have their eccentricities which make them more vivid, even slightly haunting ... Through this twist, Banville cleverly ups the stakes of his novel, adding a sense of suspense on top of curiosity ... All these elements of intrigue come together in Snow to give us a classically compelling mystery ... worth a read for being a well-written, engaging and entertaining mystery, but not much more. It does not do much to subvert or \'play with\' its genre. And that isn’t a value judgment on my part; as Todorov notes, \'the masterpiece of popular literature is precisely the book which best fits its genre.\' If anything then, Snow is a testament to Banville’s mastery of detective fiction.
Judith Schalansky, trans. By Jackie Smith
RaveZYZZYVA... a spell-binding meditation on the instinctive desire of humans to preserve everything despite the fact that everything will inevitably be lost ... Schalansky does not simply describe these lost things and their histories like one would in a catalog or encyclopedia. Rather, she preserves the old by creating it anew. Each chapter offers a vivid, living experience of these monuments that can no longer be experienced in the physical world. Schalansky is not shy about the full implications of death and loss ... As readers of this remembering project, we are taken on a wonderful journey through time and space, seeing with new eyes things we will never get to see ... Schalansky’s prose is reflective in places and exuberant in others; she balances the mourning of death with the commemoration of life ... The chapters in An Inventory of Losses are ghosts: wisps of their former selves, haunting the present with the faint sketch of what once was.
