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Recent Reviews
Agustín Fernández Mallo, Trans. by Thomas Bunstead
Positive Music & Literature Even though the inherent loneliness and difficulty of Mallo’s creative endeavor—as well as that of any practicing artist—shines through clearly, the success of his trilogy in reconfiguring and recreating the world around him manages to inspire hope. Such a change or revitalization, however, is fundamentally a displacement: a reconfiguration of the existing landscape that is analogous, in Mallo’s thinking, to the nearly quixotic endeavors of Land Art ... The order of the novels leads to a myriad of interpretations ... A great deal of the Nocilla Trilogy’s charm comes from this construction, an anti-hierarchical system that attempts to open itself to as many interpretations as possible ... Mallo’s aesthetic of fragmentation, brand names, and meta-textualization of his life push him into an aesthetic at once embracing the demands and fragmentation of certain past writers, while also pointing to the information overload and difficulty of writing a novel in the present. The Nocilla Trilogy not only tells the creation story of a new novel, but of a new reader.
Clarice Lispector, Trans. by Benjamin Moser & Magdalena Edwards
Positive Music & Literature The power of Lispector’s heavily textured sentences and Virginia’s unbridled introspections and contemplations of who she wants to be cannot offset the fact that this three-hundred-page book would have benefited from being as economically edited as her more acclaimed works. Virginia’s monotonous ruminations often blur together; her thoughts and struggles can be profound and beautiful, but so many pages of the same rolling waves of dreamy sentences can sap even the hardiest reader’s will to dig into the work. This novel is perfect for those who already revere Lispector and want a further understanding of where her thoughts and aesthetic went after Near to the Wild Heart ... despite its weaknesses, I think The Chandelier will reward those who enjoy challenging works about the power of the mind and about how we might grow up—without destroying who we have been, without fearing who we might come to be.