PositiveThe Baffler... some madcap Rothian scene-making with a greater and uncomfortable plumbing of what it means, all these years later, to be Jewish in America ... Cohen’s writing carries us through, even when the scenes, like generational battles at the dinner table, seem well-worn ... an ideas novel. There is a plot that tugs us onward, though it’s a bit beside the point ... What Cohen tracks, through speeches and letters, is how a fringe ideology came to define, almost entirely, what...Zionism means in the twenty-first century.
Joshua Cohen
RaveThe Brooklyn Rail... a campus novel, as well as a send-up of the campus novel, wryly irreverent like Kingsley Amis, narrated by an old man, yet written by a young man (Cohen is 41), akin to what Anthony Burgess did in his trenchant opus Earthly Powers. It\'s Rothian in its rampant Jewishness, Bellow-like in its braggadaccio diatribes ... After novels of more obvious ambition, this one seems, at least by comparison to earlier, odder works, ironic in its ostensible simplicity, and yet the sensibilities are earnest, empathetic ... told in a smart but colloquial voice...replete with linguistic bravado ... To read Cohen is, as Nietszche said, to hear with a third ear, that ontological orifice that allows us to hear and speak in a voice that is ours.
PositiveThe Village VoiceMiéville is a committed leftist and proud partisan in this engaging retelling of the events that rocked the foundations of the twentieth century. His goals are not condemnation or hagiography. In a blow-by-blow account of the year 1917, he hopes to reintroduce history to a world that has a habit of forgetting it … The author’s point is that history must be understood in its moment, not just in a future context unknown to its participants. With his painterly touch and zest for characterization — Lenin is as mercurial as he is brilliant, a ‘striking, prematurely balding man with distinctive narrow eyes’ — he sets the scene in St. Petersburg, eventually renamed Petrograd and then Leningrad, the seat of the revolution … If October is, at times, a maze of names and bureaucratic wrangling, Miéville’s métier is rendering atmosphere and character, and reminding us just how remarkable this single year was.
