Gabriela Wiener, trans. by Jennifer Adcock and Lucy Greaves
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksWiener is often presented as a \'sex\' writer, and accounts of her sexual experiences, narrated with a bemused frankness, dominate the pages of this collection. She is, however, an adept chronicler of many subjects and a talented writer in a variety of tones ... At her best, Wiener is witty and fast-paced ... Part of her appeal lies in the fact that she sometimes writes about sexual topics that have not been well explored, especially by women, and a sense of incredulity is part of the pleasure of reading her work ... Wiener is a talented writer with a gift for metaphor ... Wiener provides no explanation of this context for the non–Latin American reader; as a result, the first few pages are hard to follow ... the translation of Latin American cronistas like Gabriela Wiener is a cause for celebration. Talented and innovative.
Alice Mattison
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksMattison tells several stories in Conscience, and watching them grow and intersect is one of the greatest pleasures of the book ... The shifting perspective works well, as a chorus of \'I\'s (there are three of them—Olive, Jean, and, to a lesser extent, Griff) helps build a collective sense of the collateral damage of the war and the noisy overlap of friends, family, and lovers that make up a community. At a certain point, the voices seem to blend and merge, becoming almost one ... Most of the plot elements fit together neatly, something we have come to expect from Mattison, who is very good with form. But characters, like Olive and Griff’s oldest daughter, are sometimes brought in to serve the plot, never to return ... But ... Every time I wanted to object, Mattison pulled me back in, some of which, I think, is connected to the book’s pacing, which is wonderfully slow and lush ... You could argue that Griff gets second billing because he’s a male character in a book about female empowerment, but Griff is also black, one of several black characters in the novel, none of whom have much of a voice ... to divide the world along the lines of race, gender, and ethnicity (black, Jewish, male, female) doesn’t serve the part of her story that takes place in New Haven in the 21st century ... It takes a long time to make sense of things, to paint a full picture of an important moment in history, especially one as fraught as the war in Vietnam, but this is the luxury (and, perhaps, the responsibility) of literature. And it should be applauded when it’s done well, as Mattison mostly does here.
Veronica Gerber Bicecci, Trans. by Christina MacSweeney
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksA smart story of love and loss with a clever mix of narrative techniques, Empty Set may be an antidote to the current climate of despair ... the characters are rich and well developed, the mood is contagious, and the plot is simple yet intriguingly complex ... The ending shouldn’t come as a surprise, but, to Gerber Bicecci’s credit, it does. Suspicious of narrative at the beginning of the story, hiding behind her puzzles and her diagrams, Verónica gradually finds a place within it, a way forward that offers readers an enticing model for how to exist in a fragmented world of ever-multiplying identities.
Daphne Merkin
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe book gets off to a rocky start — Merkin jumps around a lot, trying out an awkward second- and third-person narration before settling comfortably into a more obvious first — but after that, she moves easily between the present and the past, between her personal story and the more general observations and concerns she has to share about her disease.
Above all, Merkin, like Styron, wants us to understand what it means to be depressed. In scene after scene, she shows us how insidiously depression invades her thoughts, the impact it has had on her career, and the many ways it strains her relationships with family, friends, and lovers ... there are times when, instead of stepping back to observe her depression, she gets bogged down in it ... The devil is in the details, and some readers will lose patience with the juxtaposition of the emotional privations Merkin so painstakingly describes and the privileges she so casually reveals ... she does, in this memoir, what good writers do: she sends urgent, cogent dispatches from another world, a protracted battlefield that we might not otherwise know about.
