MixedTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Written in semi-rhyming, often archaic prose over eighty pages, and powered by Rabelaisian energy, it features a group of new characters who tell stories, eat, drink, trade barbs, debate the entry of women to the guild, eat more and engage in theological arguments about death. It is a virtuosic set piece ... Can be considered encyclopedic in a different sense from the one meant by Calvino. With its lengthy retelling of episodes from the region’s history, its detailed depictions of the physical landscape, shifting seasons, flora, fauna and the region’s agricultural quirks – cows used to be transported by boat to pasture – this is a compendium of knowledge about a single subject, a billet-doux to Deux-Sèvres. But while it contains passages of interest, the overall result will be a trifle baffling to anyone who does not share those tender feelings.
Tahir Hamut Izgil, trans. by Joshua L. Freeman
RaveTimes Literary Supplement\"... provides a compelling account of life in Urumqi, the regional capital, during the years in which this vast, repressive system built towards its apotheosis. The book offers a vital portrait of Uyghur cultural and social life in Urumqi – the friendships, the artistic alliances, the conversations in bookshops and restaurants – and in doing so makes clear what has been destroyed ... In the elegant, elliptical poems that appear throughout the text – translated, like the rest of the memoir, with great skill and subtlety by Joshua L. Freeman – Tahir both acknowledges and transforms the worsening political situation. Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of the book is its refreshing lack of political rhetoric: there are no pronouncements on the great evil of the Chinese state. Tahir lets the awful facts speak for themselves ... in the vast tragedy that is still unfolding for Uyghurs, both inside and outside China, there are no purely happy endings. Tahir Hamut Izgil is candid about the guilt he feels for escaping when so many remain captive. It is unlikely that he, and thousands like him, will get to return.\
Magda Szabó, trans. by Len Rix
PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Traps the reader in the unsparing mind of Eszter ... Some of these confidences don’t make sense on first reading, an effect that yields a sense of both closeness and distance to the character – a dynamic that mirrors Eszter’s tendency to push people away. Len Rix, the translator of three other novels by Szabó (1917–2007), renders Eszter’s blunt, merciless narration in smoothly cold prose ... The impression is of a skewed fairy tale ... What distinguishes this novel from being a fairy tale – inverted or otherwise – is its psychological complexity.
Antonio Di Benedetto, Tr. Esther Allen
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)The first part of the novel delicately balances the comedy of neurosis with a study of the increasing suffering and alienation of the narrator, who recognizes his contradictions...but not his tendency toward self-importance ... As befitting a book about the difficulty of resisting noise, his narration is delivered in short sections and contains frequent ellipsis. There is a profitable uncertainty to these formal silences, which can be seen as either the product of the man’s aural oppression or a willed act of resistance ... Allen’s taut, elegant translation does not raise its voice, let alone shout ... Di Benedetto is particularly good at conveying our hero’s increasingly aberrant perceptions ... The closest this lean, brilliant novel gets to offering consolation is when the narrator reminds us that \'from silence were we made, and to the dust of silence shall we return\'.
