PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Fragmentary, elusive, ambiguously semi-autobiographical ... A novel of ideas with the novel taken out ... There is a sense in these pages of the novel finally confronting itself, or its real stakes: an acknowledgement of depersonalization or unfeeling rendered, despite itself, with great feeling.
Hari Kunzru
PositiveTimes Literary Supplement\"[A] peculiarly dread-soaked, intellectually engaged, state-of-the-nation take on the country house novel ... The result is like a stab at portraiture by a talented landscape painter: a novel that is considerably less convincing in figure than in ground ... All credit to Kunzru here: it is no mean feat, evoking that short but exceptionally well-documented period in British cultural history, to thread the needle between verisimilitude and poking fun at a subculture so naturally self-satirizing that it had exhausted itself of comic potential almost at the moment it emerged. Kunzru succeeds largely by virtue of restraint ... Which brings us back to the house in the woods. By comparison to the flashback material the scenes that take place in the novel’s present are oddly overdetermined ... It is in the implications of Jay’s Gatsby-esque self-erasure – more than in the somewhat soapy consequences of his reappearance – that Blue Ruin really comes into its own as a penetrating, hyperarticulate meditation on art as either an accessory to toxic consumerism or a means of rendering ourselves invisible to it.\
Neel Mukherjee
MixedTimes Literary Supplement (UK)The three parts, then, operate simultaneously as discrete, fictionally self-sufficient if subtly intertextual, episodes and as a nest of embedded narratives, the second and third parts at a double remove from the reader, fictions created by fictional characters we have met in the first part. Where this approach begins to creak a bit is in the manner of the stories’ telling ... The inescapability of the large economic forces determining their fate, powerfully conveyed as it is, feathers the brake on its narrative momentum.
Jeanette Winterson
MixedTimes Literary Supplement (UK)In the tales themselves the effect would be greater if Winterson relied a little less on genre convention ... The problem here...lies in Winterson’s explanatory reflex.
Salman Rushdie
PanTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Rushdie has set himself a formidable tonal challenge. His habitual method, of course, is to dress myth in modernity’s clothes ... In the new novel myth is front and centre, with modernity, in the form of the nameless narrator, peeping out from behind the plywood ramparts of his medieval mise en scène to remind us, with the postmodernist’s knack for plausible deniability, that this is simultaneously in earnest and a bucketload of high-spirited codswallop ... As with all magic realism, the danger lies in a sort of inflationary weightlessness ... One solution is to be incantatory, to invest your prose...with such glittering specificity that it underwrites the fancifulness. In Victory City this option is, unhappily, put out of reach by the deal Rushdie strikes between pastiche and parody. For the most part the plot – the battles, the dynastic intermarriages, the machinations at court – progresses at a highly readable clip, accelerating at times to the pace of synoptic history, slowing down at others to attend in greater detail ... Fundamentally unsurprising.
Matthew Green
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)It is this tantalizing sense of the almost-at-hand that informs the historian Matthew Green’s fascinating new tour of Britain’s lost towns and villages ... amounts to a sobering reminder of earthly transience ... Green recounts all this at a measured, engaging clip, although he is not above straining for effect ... At times, Green pays insufficient attention to the surface of his prose ... If the project is to resurrect Britain’s lost places, then lapses like these can only send them back to the bottom of the reservoir. For the most part, however, Shadowlands is a well-researched, highly readable history whose deepest import may be premonitory. The re- emergence of Aceredo was caused by a historic drought attributed to climate change; climatologists expect rainfall in Portugal to drop by up to forty per cent by 2100 ... By helping us to identify with their lost inhabitants, what the stories of Skara Brae and Dunwich evoke most powerfully is not the past but our probable future, when our cities have been abandoned or swept out to sea.
Jem Calder
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)If these mordant, intellectually agile stories of young love, life and work are indeed set in London, then it is the London of a lover of American literature. As such, the idea (promoted in the publisher’s blurb and elsewhere) that Reward System is a notably fresh, ultra-contemporary take on the tech-inflected tribulations of the author’s generation is somewhat misguided. Rather, Calder has adapted the literary modes of previous generations to present circumstances. Comparisons to David Foster Wallace are for emergency use only, but here I must grasp the little hammer and break the glass ... Calder’s prose splices archaism and tech-speak in a manner strongly reminiscent of Foster Wallace’s jolie-laide patchwork of registers ... That said, for all that Calder borrows from his forebears, he does it exceptionally well.
Cees Nooteboom, tr. Laura Watkinson
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... it seems a telling error that the dates given at the end of the book actually indicate 523 days, the missing ten in keeping, you might argue, with the book’s peculiar mixture of precision and free-associative, sun-drenched day-dreaminess. Who’s counting, when a description of an unidentified Menorcan insect can lead seamlessly to a memory of shrunken heads in a Mexican museum, and from there, via Zurbarán’s meditating saints and the skull capacity of Australopithecus, to Montaigne, Lucretius, and the inconstancy of human belief systems? ... The digressiveness of Nooteboom’s method owes a good deal to W. G. Sebald, even if, largely because of the rapidity of Nooteboom’s transitions – the constant flitting from nature observation to reflections on literature, language and politics – it lacks the gravity of Sebald’s reveries, the sense that the present, even in its most seemingly inconsequential detail, is inescapably freighted by history ... Likewise, what prevents 533 from disappearing into its own digressiveness is Nooteboom’s appealing habit of introducing, very casually, the sort of weighty idea another writer might have treated with more fanfare ... It’s testimony to the power of this humane, insightful and deeply cultured book that it should resolve the dissonance so gracefully, between the monastic urge to contemplation and the world it would repudiate.
Paul Fischer
PositiveHarper\'s... the work Fischer has done in going back to primary sources, in particular the unpublished memoirs of Lizzie and Adolphe, sheds light on Le Prince as a free-spirited idealist, more interested in the social and expressive potential of film than in its commercial exploitation. The claim Fischer’s biography has on our attention rests both on Le Prince’s achievements and the vision he had for them. One of the pleasures, and sadnesses, of Fischer’s account is its evocation of a period, however brief, when the emergence of a technology seemed to herald a new age of human interconnectedness. What followed instead was Le Prince’s disappearance, the theft of his ideas, and the cornering of a fledgling movie market by practices verging on gangsterism. The story of his life amounts not only to a captivating whodunit, but to a lens on the development of cinema itself ... Fischer’s narration is briskly paced and elegant, although he borrows too often from the stock library of tension-building effects.
Amitava Kumar
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Kumar navigates the mists of contemporary deception with a penetrating intelligence and keen sense of paradox. A Time Outside This Time may pitch \'the truth of fiction\' against the fictiveness of fake news, but it does so in the form of a novel all but indistinguishable from nonfiction.
Colson Whitehead
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)One of Harlem Shuffle’s quiet strengths is its fine gradings of the distinctions between selectively deaf complicity and overt criminality. Over the course of the novel’s three long parts, which span the five years between the Theresa heist and the Harlem riots of 1964, Carney is drawn ever deeper into the underworld ... It is in this social-realist mode that Harlem Shuffle most effectively frees itself from the constraints of the crime thriller; or, rather, uses those constraints to advance a vision of America beyond genre, each stick-up and swindle and shakedown a local instance of the general condition, which Whitehead diagnoses as a culture of stupendous, and interdependent, enterprise and violence ... On the other hand, constraints are sometimes just constraints, and the off-the-shelf elements – the overheated streets, the stock mobsters in their lurid suits, the evil plutocrat at the top of the criminal hierarchy – serve only to undermine the novel’s social-historical sweep. This might matter less in a faster-footed novel, but in Harlem Shuffle the telling is hampered by a narrative device that has served Whitehead better in the past ... In Harlem Shuffle the effect of Whitehead’s tendency to fall back and fill in is more obstructive, a buffering wheel just when things are getting exciting ... Such lapses are all the more frustrating given the vividness on display elsewhere ... When Harlem Shuffle springs to life, it does so with a controlled intensity that resonates beyond the immediate events of the novel.
David Foster Wallace
RaveThe Independent... a book that derives its power from a thousand incidental victories ... DFW\'s style is so relaxed, and so sparsely punctuated, that the eye speeds past phrases another writer might have cushioned in commas, as jewels worthy of the reader\'s special attention.
James Wood
MixedHarper\'s... mov[es] nimbly between the three main characters’ subtly but scrupulously differentiated points of view while never quite relinquishing a modicum of authorial oversight—that is, irony ... Like Stephen Foster’s classic parlor song Hard Times Come Again No More, a favorite of Alan’s, Upstate has \'the wisdom of its mixtures; the fortifying power of dappled things\' ... Or it does in part. For all the novel’s roving sympathies, it is Alan’s perspective that dominates ... The problem lies precisely in Wood cleaving so closely to Alan’s point of view ... The novel is full of such tame TripAdvisorish noticings, secondhand quips, and mini-essays on screen addiction, supersize portions, American cheese. Clearly, this is a deliberate flattening ... the mundanity of Alan’s observations is so faithfully preserved that it can’t help but dampen the narration ... Wood might loosen up a little ... The dialogue also suffers from an occasional stiffness and overdetermination ... it’s on the structural level, in the shifting geometries of familial love and loyalty, and Alan’s faltering movement, as the snow thaws, from blithe detachment to understanding, that Upstate comes into its own, and nearest to life.
