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Eimear McBride
Positive The Rumpus The narrator begins telling her story from the womb, and the pages that unfold are nominally her autobiography. Coming of age in Catholic Ireland, enduring the onset of sexuality, escaping to college and Dublin, McBride’s narrator is always ricocheting back to her family and her origins despite or because of the damage they’ve done … The entire novel is addressed to the narrator’s unnamed brother, who survived brain cancer as a child only to suffer from the damage that life-saving surgery inflicted, and to slowly succumb to the drabness of disability and dependence. He is the you to her I.
Ariel Levy
Mixed The San Francisco Chronicle The memoir built around that essay ["Thaksgiving in Mongolia"] never reaches the same heights as the original manifestation ... This is an essayist’s memoir, not a novelist’s. Levy presents scenes from her life like a series of loosely related studies of a feminist version of Macbeth’s o’erweening ambition. The book’s approach can be frustrating. Explanations and through lines are replaced by considerations of subjects as they crop up in her life ... In offering the backstory of a marriage gone sour and the tumultuous aftermath of coming home unpregnant, the encapsulated shriek of Levy’s original essay becomes muted and dispersed. She is now a woman whose plans have become sand spilling through her fingers, still learning that loss is neither something you deserve nor can escape.
Shanthi Sekaran
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle Shanthi Sekaran has drawn the truest map of incipient motherhood I have yet read. She gives voice to every anxiety, every fierce need, capturing the vulnerability of immersing one’s self in love for a child ... Rarely does a novel set in the Bay Area do justice to this place without becoming either self-satisfied or satirical. The Berkeley of Lucky Boy is a loving mix of town and gown, progressive politics and serious privilege ... Upon the birth of Soli’s son, Sekaran’s evocation of the sublime terror of parenthood is unmatched ... The novel isn’t perfect, stumbling sometimes in the details as it reaches for breadth...in the brutish monotony of her imprisonment, Soli narrows into a character more symbolic than individual, a circumstance with a human face. But these off notes do not sour the engrossing and wrenching story of the heartfelt fight over the fate of one lucky boy.
Eimear McBride
Mixed The San Francisco Chronicle ...the dialogue that dominates the prose of this book is sharp and entertaining ... About halfway through, the man begins a monologue that lasts for nearly a third of the book. This cathartic confession propels the relationship but derails the novel. Our narrator turns into his audience ... Unlike McBride’s first book, in which familiar subject matter was interpreted anew through the stuttering, circular form of the language, here McBride can’t quite escape the cliche. Her lyricism still scatters light across the page, and her fragmented style hammers you with immediacy, but the story falls prey to nostalgia and wishful thinking.
Marie NDiaye, Trans. by Jordan Stump
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle In Ladivine, Stump captures the smooth slide of NDiaye’s characters from a recognizable world into a matter-of-fact magical realism in a steady, rhythmic prose that hypnotizes ... NDiaye’s writing brings together psychological realism and absurdist violence with elements of class, race and gender, but what’s truly at stake in “Ladivine” is the relationship between parents and children. Ladivine herself characterizes her husband’s rejection of his parents’ demanding love as 'his necessary initiation into hard-heartedness,' but finds herself torn between a desire to protect her children and be free of them. The liberation from obligation celebrated in the existentialist novels that have defined modern French literature for an American audience becomes a damaging weight in Ladivine.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle Her revelations about the emotional freight of language to the child of immigrants bring great weight to what could otherwise seem a slight book inspired by a successful writer’s whimsy ... Lahiri spins a linguistic memoir that actually tells the story of a transformation of identity. In Lahiri’s hands, these essays and stories become an invaluable insight into the craft of writing not as storytelling but as speaking the self into existence.