RaveThe New York Review of BooksHsu seems to have total recall, and apparently some very thoroughgoing journals. He is adept at evoking the flavor of specific times and places through a pointillist buildup of small details. He conveys the quality of passing time at an age when every day brings a new lesson with lifelong reverberations ... Hsu makes us see how his and Ken’s and their friends’ stories are tossed on the sea of history, how identity takes shape from a thousand factors, how personalities flow into one another, how chance and destiny can be hard to tell apart. He had to write the book to perpetuate Ken and bring him to the attention of the world.
Emmanuel Carrère, tr. John Lambert
PanBookforumCarrère’s efforts to put across to readers his many years of yoga, meditation, and tai chi entail a great deal of repetition and a great many vague attempts to describe indescribable states. Despite his weaving in various memories and digressions and stabs at humor, this results in considerable longueurs. He seems to turn in circles, trying less to discover something than to convince himself, as well as us. It is that rare thing in Carrère’s work: it is boring ... the omission of Carrère’s account of how he fell into his catastrophic breakdown opens not an ellipse but a giant hole in the book. You’re left to think the funeral had something to do with it, or the Gemini woman, maybe even the yoga. But Carrère has enough best-seller chops to remember that he has to supply a redemptive arc ... The chapter is generic treacle, as if it had been plucked from the fundraising site of an NGO ... the book fails as both fiction and nonfiction.
