RaveThe Chicago Review of BooksZambra abandons his miniatures, mostly leaves behind his meta-awareness, varies point-of-view, improvises plotlines more than ever before, and proves his talent in the held-with-two-hands novel ... this novel isn’t about poetry. It isn’t packed with poems or theories of poems. Instead, it is about the promise of poetry: the appeal poetry holds as a domain of magic, where one can dwell with diverse solitudes and where reality merges with fantasies and dreams ... In life, love passes through disappointment, rejection, misunderstanding, bad timing, accident, circumstance, and tribulation. This is what Chilean Poet captures so honestly: the course and damages of love. And Zambra’s novels remain clever and poetic, never too serious, always affirming. This quality could be described as warmth, but I will call it inclusivity: Zambra’s novels will always accept us. They will not be bitter and they will not allow us to writhe in anguish. They will show us the pain of maturation and the pain of relationships, but they will lead us through these passages gently, with humor and compassion. One could call this unrealistic; we break others and people break us without warning or consideration. But from the distance of the future, where Zambra’s narrators stand, you can see more of each event, as if you were standing back to admire a fresco. From that distance, you can admire and pity our human trials and mistrials ... These novels dangerously approach the sentimental—with their humor and tenderness, with their one-liners about reality, home, literature, and love. Somehow they never cross it. I don’t know whether it is because the actions approximate the strange turns of life or because Zambra writes in an earnest voice. Or because he believes his wise lines—believes them so strongly you must accept them on the page ... Zambra ends novels better than anyone alive, and the ending to Chilean Poet is one of the most memorable a reader can experience.
Olga Tokarczuk, Tr. Jennifer Croft
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksI have read the novel in English and Polish and promise you the praise is deserved ... Tokarczuk maintains her novel’s pace with section breaks, narrating her characters’ psychological development with the tension of discovery, the slow but progressive movement of their thoughts ... One could say it is written against our times, in defiance of our short attention spans, the spinning news cycle, the pithy tweet, and the rapid scroll. The novel poses a challenge to our literature ... By writing from an eccentric (ex-centric) perspective about the women excluded from the historical archives, Tokarczuk teaches us a new historiographic way to see: we learn to see what may not be apparent but is nonetheless present. In this way, The Books of Jacob becomes a reader’s guide for life ... The Books of Jacob is incredible because of its sheer mass of its details, so sensuous, so precise, that its readers cannot help but marvel at the novel’s construction. In the early pages, Tokarczuk lays out so much detail that the book simultaneously develops as a novel and a manifesto on writing historical fiction and retrieving, or revisioning, the past ... Tokarczuk presents Jacob as a mystery, glimpsed through others’ eyes. She does not permit us access to his final thoughts, but she does bring us into Yente’s body and soul, starting and ending the novel with her ... The tender narrator also views events “\'ex-centrically,\' distanced from conventional viewpoints. It becomes clear, reading The Books of Jacob, that these narrative theories arose from the challenge of writing the epic history of the Frankists as a novel. As Tokarczuk has said, Yente became the mechanism through which she could hold together this expansive universe of details and lives ... Croft’s translation accurately represents Tokarczuk’s prose ... But there is also something in Croft’s translation that opened the novel up for me — something in the rhythm and word choice that revealed aspects of Tokarczuk’s world I hadn’t seen before ... The Books of Jacob is a novel in which, finally, words have been acknowledged as real things, like roses and ceramic bowls ... The reader’s guide was right: I found myself transported and transformed. Every time I have experienced this novel, I have become a different person.
Rachel Cusk
PositiveThe Rumpus\"The sentences aren’t so concentrated as before, and they don’t culminate, like [Cusk\'s Outline trilogy\'s] Faye’s, in lyrical beats—they just keep going, half-breaths in a long-rambling speech. This, we know, will be different, and the narrator will define herself through her own speech, not subtle implication or half-silence or tone ... Cusk creates an interesting mix of atmospheres with a contemporary levity of description and voice ... reading it, I did not feel excited or moved, as with Outline or the best recent fiction. But the novel’s unusual rhythms and voice lingered with me like those strange, violent dreams in which the secrets you perceive in close ones reveal themselves and alter you for hours, for days. The voice reaches and reaches at answers to broad questions. Sometimes it pulls back pieces of insight and beauty.
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