PositiveSlantThrough the numerous passengers, Le Tellier explores the question of duplication from a personal, social, and philosophical perspective. By virtue of relying on so many characters, each one is largely inchoate and archetypal—profiles meant to explore the bigger questions at The Anomaly’s heart through different lenses ... Le Tellier writes with a self-conscious eye toward adaptation, as the book is intentionally evocative of blockbusters and polished streaming originals ... Despite alluding to the obvious religious and philosophical implications of the phenomenon, the book largely fails to explore them in the broadest sense. Any answers it offers come in the more personal, internal deliberations of its characters as they wrestle with what the duplications mean for them ... In the one-on-one character confrontations, Le Tellier does force the reader to reflect on some truly unnerving questions ... Perhaps it’s a testament to our times or Le Tellier’s instincts that the characters’ subdued reactions to meeting their twins don’t seem so unrealistic. It’s an anti-solipsism that feels relieving for a time of increased isolation and image-curation.
Luiz Ruffatot, trans. by Julia Sanches
PositiveSlant... it’s not the notes that Ruffato plays that matter, but the notes he doesn’t ... As for the town itself, Ruffato does a skillful job of characterizing in a way that makes it seem more than just some provincial setting for his narrative to play out (it’s his own hometown, after all) ... Stripped of paragraph breaks or typical divisions between speakers, interrupted with idle thoughts that distract Oséias from his immediate train of thought, Late Summer’s continuous prose embeds the reader so intimately within Oséias’s story that it becomes even easier to identify with the man as he feels carried along toward the inevitable ... Ruffato gives us a quiet novel about loneliness, the universal human desire to be seen and felt, and the slow cost of isolation.
Peter Stamm, Trans. by Michael Hofmann
PositiveSlantStamm isn’t predictable, and he isn’t ordinary, and over the course of this especially slim novel, he accomplishes something remarkable by giving the reader a story that’s simultaneously disorienting and comforting ... At the outset, Sweet Indifference can be puzzling and slippery, but along the way the same distinctive style that distorts begins to coalesce into something more enlightening. Instead of dissonance, Stamm manages to produce an unusual harmony. It often comes across as a meditation structured around one man’s effort to understand, mold, restructure, and interpret himself through memories ... If Stamm is speaking to some distressing urge to reconcile one’s life with a wishful memory of it, then perhaps all it takes is some perspective.
