PanTimes Literary Supplement (UK)García Márquez’s sons...have decided to publish one final novel ... They should have resisted the temptation ... A recognizably Marquezian fable, stripped down to its basics. There are flashes of the author’s trademark charm: flowers, Caribbean gentlemen in linen suits, the scent of jasmine. Some of the old tricks and artifices are there, but all the subtlety is gone. The author’s once rich vocabulary is noticeably diminished.
Leslie Jamison
MixedTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Alongside the insights, there is a lot of beautifully expressed handwringing ... . Jamison is often funny about her situation, but after 200 pages we can sympathize with the friend who tells Jamison that she’s exhausting – always in the middle of some psychodrama.
Julie Myerson
PositiveProspect Magazine (UK)\"So much is painful, and feels truthful ... art made by people who know what they are talking about is invaluable. No one could have written more honestly about the torment of watching a child descend into addiction than Julie Myerson. Only she and her family will know if she has paid too high a price for it.\
Javier Marías, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa
PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)With Marías, it doesn’t help to get too hung up on credibility. His novels are games in which a universal vocabulary of baddies, portents and tropes allows him subtly, and over hundreds of pages, to investigate more complex ideas ... Circumlocutions and repetitions more naturally create a kind of melody against which the larger themes are played ... Marías can be very funny, despite his weighty themes, especially in his descriptions of the inhabitants of Ruán. Among the different tones in this novel I also detected a querulousness, a yearning for the twentieth century, before the tyranny of mobile phones and the internet.
Fernanda Melchor, trans. by Sophie Hughes
PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Melchor writes about events she mostly didn’t witness, drawing on interviews, news stories and hearsay ... The essays shed light both on the author’s source material and her stylistic evolution ... Melchor introduces a colourful cast of dockworkers and petty criminals.
Mariana Enriquez, trans. by Megan McDowell
PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)\"Enriquez’s fiction is set against forty years of Argentine history...Thankfully, there’s no suggestion that the Darkness is a clunky metaphor for the dictatorship: you can’t take ghoulish delight in a novel about a genuine and recent horror. Rather, the political events provide a background to the story: the \'vibration of evil in the street\' makes it easier for the Order to operate ... Some readers may feel uncomfortable about this tangential connection, but Enriquez is careful not to be sensationalist, even when writing about the discovery of a mass grave ... She is also hugely – some might say overly – ambitious, having invented a supernatural family saga that can seem too ready to digress into side stories. Layers of background and explanation tie up our attention and slacken the pace. Juan seems to linger on the brink of death for hundreds of pages. For a true aficionado, a gothic novel can probably never go on too long. Anyone less devoted may find their attention drifting.\
Fernanda Melchor, trans. by Sophie Hughes
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Paradais is both more compact and more cogent [than Hurricane Season]. Rhythm and lexis work in tandem to produce a savage lyricism. The translator Sophie Hughes marvellously matches the author in her pursuit of a new cadence ... From its first sentence, in fact, Paradais feels rhythmically propelled towards a violent climax. Full stops occur rarely enough to seem meaningful, Melchor using long lines of unbroken narrative to reel in her terrible ending ... The author wants to understand the violence, not merely condemn it ... The novel’s language, meanwhile, is both high-flown and street-smart, strewn with Veracruzian slang, the odd made-up word and many eye-watering expletives ... Pressure builds remorselessly to a dreadful climax. It is an extraordinary feat of control, making Fernanda Melchor’s exceptional novel into a contemporary masterpiece.
Mario Vargas Llosa trans. by Adrian Nathan West
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)The author leaves little room for ambiguity in his analysis, and Harsh Times often reads more like a disquisition than a novel. More complex is the structure, the narrative sliding backwards and forwards over three Guatemalan presidencies. This is a favourite technique of Vargas Llosa’s, and the effect here is cleverly disorientating, suggesting an inevitability to the cycle of disruption and violence. There are lots of names and very few dates, but the sinuous plot is not difficult to follow because the main themes are so often repeated. Vargas Llosa, who once lost a bid to become the president of Peru, knows how to communicate his ideas, and his intellectualism comes spritzed with humour. He also shares with his Latin American contemporaries, such as Gabriel García Márquez, a love of colour and hyperbole.
Kazuo Ishiguro
PositiveProspect (UK)It’s the combination of sincerity and strangeness that creates such a fertile territory for his stories. He likes to experiment with genre, and Klara and the Sun uses elements of both fable and dystopia to turn some familiar ideas on their heads ... What Klara and the other characters understand about the world overlaps and intersects in strange ways ... Tantalising developments happen at the edges of Klara’s experience. We’re privy to some of it—conversations about Atlas Brookings or Josie’s health—as well as, in one extraordinary aside, the revelation that Rick has been developing a flock of drones disguised as birds. We keep willing Ishiguro to train his focus on this view and he keeps turning us away from it ... Having very much enjoyed the first two thirds of Klara and the Sun, I was disappointed by an ending that veered too close to Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince—but perhaps disappointment was always part of the author’s plan.
