RaveZYZZYVAI am forever grateful, and particularly, most recently, for this first novel by the Moroccan-born writer Meryem Alaoui. The novel is a vivid, and vividly angry, first-person portrait of Jmiaa ... Jmiaa is biting, funny, oh so streetwise, and not a bit ashamed of her work. You can be ashamed for her, should you dare, but the more Jmiaa’s story unfolds, the more her spirit amazes, springing up off the page ... The novel is refreshingly a referendum on hypocrisy, and though Jmiaa may be a paradox, she is not a hypocrite, and when she is serendipitously in a situation of plenty, she enjoys herself into leglessness ... Other Press makes a beautiful book, with French flaps and pages that float with Moroccan Arabian mandalas, and majuscules in Arabic script that start certain passages. Presentation is a subject in Straight from the Horse’s Mouth. Which djellaba does Jmiaa wear today to stand at the entrance to the market place? What are the other women wearing, how is a hem lifted to entice, and when all the window dressing of this age-old transaction get shuttered, what naked realities emerge, and what beautiful spirit remains as though architecture, art? Here is a novel worth your reading time; here is a novel beautiful to hold.
Percival Everett
RaveZYZZYVAReading Everett is usually an experience of reckoning, and not just for a protagonist against the ugliness his life has served him up, but a reckoning, also, for a reader in her oh-so-comfy chair, the unnerving drama of the story reaching out and grabbing her by her face, You. You think you know best, you think you’d do it different, you think you’d know? You know nothing. There is always a hugely satisfying clarity to Everett’s work, a clearing out of cant and ideology and best intentions, and a showing of the cool hard landscape of what is. There is hardly a writer in the language I respect more than Percival Everett, and it’s because of this cold bead. He has the intellectual and aesthetic agility to just blow us out of the water, but he does the more lasting, though perhaps crueler, more respectful thing of putting us at the center of an extremity, calling into question our own bustling officious ideas of agency, the gun just out of sight ... To say I emerge a more honest person after reading Everett is an understatement, and it’s his gift to us, but at what cost? Because that’s another reckoning, how an author gets toted up, thought of, regarded, how he continues to abide knowing what he knows about his work from others. One feels so often a disconcerting closeness when reading Everett’s prose, an interrogatory intimacy. That’s not a game of telephone, that’s one call to one ear, no interference, no static, no more salacious version to be gotten elsewhere; the reader just has to accept the call, to listen.
Kathryn Davis
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe Silk Road will be thought of as a difficult novel, a challenging read, and it might be wise to set aside any desire for palliative care and take up the raucous and demanding work of dying (or living) ... We forget to laugh with writers whose work scares us, or challenges us, or makes us heft up the huge Webster’s Third International onto the couch too many times because not even the internet is giving us a definition of that word—or not a good one, not with cognates...and there are passages in The Silk Road of great humor and delicious bawdiness ... The Silk Road is an act of profound and uproarious consciousness in the face of so much that is involuntary and inescapable: the workings and failings of our physical bodies ... The Silk Road is...a handhold in the flood of time, a not particularly sluggish eddy, but an eddy nonetheless: \'Swing low, Sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home.\' Go with the metaphors, entertain them all, that’s the life we have, language, our parole. That chariot ain’t here yet.
