Clarice Lispector, Trans. by Benjamin Moser & Magdalena Edwards
MixedFull StopThe Chandelier is written almost entirely in a stream of consciousness style that evokes Woolf or Faulkner at their most challenging. Clarice builds pages-long tableaus to capture singular moments, mining Virgínia’s subconscious for even the most inchoate pieces of language. This is a novel with a narrator who admits herself that \'she couldn’t complete her thoughts, she was loathe to trace them out so definitely that they’d appear bright in their poverty.\' The Chandelier, accordingly, is the conduit for a current of incomplete thoughts. It trickles with such loveliness that a reader might not notice herself drowning. Only rarely does dialogue or description offer relief ... Memory — calm, sad, and very much alive in Clarice’s prose — is responsible for iterating the world of sensations ... the longer I read Clarice the more I accumulate unintelligible sentences that I can’t ignore.
Lisa Ko
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThough her narrative never penetrates the walls of the fictionalized facility that haunts it, Ko illuminates the plunder of immigrant lives at the hands of the prison-industrial complex by describing its attendant outcomes ... What Ko seeks to do with The Leavers is illuminate the consequence of these facilities, and of the deportation machine as a whole, on individual lives ... Ko’s novel is self-consciously political in a manner that, at times, verges on ungainly didacticism. In Polly and Deming, however, she has created two memorable characters with the capacity to spark empathy in audiences inured to a dismaying status quo.
George Saunders
RaveThe MillionsSaunders is as qualified to build mansions as he is to build yurts. His virtuosic range of narrative voice — previously on display in his several short story collections — finds expression in this novel thanks to an inventive formal arrangement that allows for literally dozens of narrators ... Reading Lincoln in the Bardo is thus, itself, its own kind of bardo. If anything, its formal qualities condition its readers to develop a palate for the bardo’s active ingredients: dynamism, plurality, impermanence ... The bardo — for its ghostly inhabitants, for the reader, for Abe and Willie Lincoln — is a training in the hard work of choosing generosity, sensitivity, and tolerance over hate, frustration, and ignorance; needless to say, this makes Lincoln in the Bardo a timely read.
