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Recent Reviews
Michel Houellebecq
Rave The Guardian (UK) A lengthy novel, and Houellebecq labours to make it feel longer. The colour palette is overwhelmingly grey ... Like most of Houellebecq’s work, though, the book sharpens as it advances. Annihilation may present itself as a political thriller, but at its heart is a far more intimate catastrophe ... Leans neither towards hope nor despair, but towards a transcendent serenity – an eerie peace that arises, as everything arises in this novel, in the space to which warring forces give shape.
Sigrid Nunez
Rave The Guardian (UK) Such is Nunez’s great talent: she can make us care about anything ... In Nunez’s work especially, the concerns of the moment are rendered not as clumsy drama, but as living subjects of conversation; sites of intimacy and disagreement ... Nunez’s doubt feels necessary and valuable. How remarkable, then, that her work, and all the doubt it contains, still reassures us, and leaves us, as the novel reaches its extraordinarily hopeful and disarming last line, with the feeling that we have been helped.
Benjamin Labatut
Mixed The Guardian (UK) Readers familiar with Labatut’s previous novel...will recognise the sense of breathlessness his best writing can evoke. Seemingly loosened from the laws of physics they describe, his sentences range freely through time and space, connecting not only characters and events, but the delicate tissue of intellectual history, often with a lightness of touch that belies their underlying complexity ... All that a brilliant novel requires, then – talent, ambition, skill, intelligence – is present in abundance. And yet, somehow, a brilliant novel is not quite what we end up with. It’s a thermodynamic conundrum. With this much creative energy invested, why does the result feel underpowered? ... At the moments we need him to linger, Labatut is already gone.
Mariana Enriquez, trans. by Megan McDowell
Pan The Guardian (UK) Enríquez ditches the miniature and goes big. Shaping her style to the space, she allows it to go drastically slack ... It’s not just the bloat that dismays, it’s the aimlessness ... Our Share of Night takes this unstructured, direction-free wandering and makes of it a governing aesthetic. The plot is relatively straightforward ... The translator, Megan McDowell, has handled all Enríquez’s previous books, but this time something is off ... She seems to think that a commercial veneer obviates the need to invest language with life. The result is the worst of both worlds: neither thrills nor poetry, pace nor the pleasure of prose.
Bret Easton Ellis
Rave The Guardian (UK) A genuine literary event ... Others before Ellis have attempted to retool the serial narrative for the internet age. Nothing has felt quite as thrilling as Ellis’s year-long, hour-by-hour performance of The Shards ... Any lingering uncertainty that its brilliance lay more in the recitation than the writing can be dispensed with. The Shards isn’t just Ellis’s strongest novel since the 90s, it’s a full-spectrum triumph, incorporating and subverting everything he’s done before and giving us, if we follow the book’s ingenious, gleefully self-aware conceit, nothing less than the Ellis origin story ... Superficially, The Shards cleaves to Ellis’s well-established aesthetic. The dialogue is deadpan, the atmosphere paranoid and tacitly hostile. Sex is graphic and anhedonic; violence is lurid and sexualised. But beneath the coldness and carnage, a new, gentler quality is detectable ... We realise the precision and subtlety of its metatextual structure. The concluding violence is both climax and origination.
Emmanuel Carrère, tr. John Lambert
Rave The Guardian (UK) Initially, that \'conversational tone\' feels almost flippant. Apparently uninterested in differentiation, Carrère blitzes \'eastern\' thought into a distinctly beige stew ... Now Carrère’s need to inhale becomes not appropriative, but pained and poignant. Alienated from the person he thought he was, he tries to breathe himself back in ... From its deceptively glib beginnings, through the shocks and catastrophes that shake it, Yoga’s inexorable emotional arc has been obvious. And yet still the force of its final third, in which a fragile, agonisingly unhealed Carrère fills his psychic wound with the wounds of others, borders on the unbearable ... In Carrère’s helplessness, his stunned inadequacy, we finally see what he has offered us: not a self-portrait, but a collective one. Here, anatomised, is the white western capitalist everyman – wandering the aisles of the spiritual supermarket, shopping for garishly packaged bliss, in terror of a threat from without, blind to the threat from within, and wholly, tragically incapable of incorporating into his reality the very subject of all the diluted eastern spirituality with which he is so enamoured: the truth of suffering, the crushing inevitability of loss ... Carrère offers no easy answers. He doesn’t need to. His singular, ever-expanding work, in which one pain need never obscure another, in which truths and half-truths are held not in opposition but in delicate, precarious balance, is an answer in itself.
Julian Barnes
Pan The Guardian (UK) This is a work that both uses and abuses ambiguity. In doing so, it undermines itself ... There’s a sense of daring in depicting the impact of an inspirational teacher. If Finch and her teaching fall short, our faith in the novel will falter. Early on, we sense Barnes’s hesitancy. Straining to burnish Finch’s aura, he deploys, then redeploys, a reliable novelistic cliche – charisma through immobility ... This is ambiguity not as subtlety, but avoidance: Finch simply isn’t there. Hoping to make a virtue of her absence, Barnes lays down a fog of negation. But this only deepens the problem. The reader feels distanced from Finch; the novel feels distanced from its subject ... Finch’s studiously bien-pensant truisms, coupled with Barnes’s via negativa characterisation, leave the novel in search of a centre ... Barnes is in his element here – investigating with subtlety and gentleness the quiet mysteries that make up a life. So it’s all the more mystifying and disappointing that, just as the novel Elizabeth Finch could have been moves tantalisingly into view, Barnes self-sabotages, devoting the book’s entire middle section to Neil’s stolid student essay on Julian the Apostate ... Each new section must compensate for the shortcomings of the last. With a motionless middle on his hands, Barnes works in the final third to recover some sense of momentum ... Barnes has depended too heavily on ambiguity as a substitute for clarity. Consequently, Finch and her ideas lack force ... Coming as the conclusion to a novel that had begun on firmer ground, this loosening of certainty could have passed for daring subversion. Here, though, it feels like just another evasion – vagueness layered on to vagueness. Elizabeth Finch is a work stubbornly determined to deny us its pleasures, even as it hints at what they could have been.
Werner Herzog, trans. by Michael Hofmann
Mixed The Guardian (UK) At its best, Herzog’s writing bristles with the same eerie and uncompromising energy as his films. His jungle pulses with hallucinatory life ... For Herzog, language is a bridge between the earthly and the cosmic. In his quest for the visionary, though, he sometimes oversaturates his sentences ... In the context of the book’s narration these eccentricities – rendered with brio by translator Michael Hofmann – don’t feel like flaws. Instead, like the voiceovers Herzog provides for his documentaries, they lend the project an infectious, freewheeling swagger. But there is a cost. The more life Herzog gives the jungle, the more Onoda seems camouflaged by the foliage around him ... That inner tempest speaks to Onoda’s essence. Herzog, though, is deaf to it...Herzog is observing, not inhabiting. The extra interior dimension the novel form invites, and which in the right hands it excels at making visible, is closed to him. This may be merely a technical issue – perhaps, in picking up his pen, Herzog can’t entirely put down his camera. But given that Herzog is a white European man writing his way into Japanese culture, one does also wonder if a more profound failure of the imagination is to blame ... Why not give space to this encounter? Why not show us that common ground? The answer, I suspect, lies in the very terrain Herzog feels he and Onoda share: the jungle. This is where the true \'essence\' that captivates Herzog resides. He finds it not in Onoda, but through him. Of course we can’t see Onoda: Herzog has made him his lens.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken
Pan The Guardian (UK) Initially, Knausgård’s patented accretion of detail feels enriched with a new and welcome undertow: unnamed dread. The atmosphere is still and eerily fragile. Something seismic is just off-frame, advancing ... As the book progresses, another possibility presents itself: that they are merely fleeing a sinking novel. Arne is set aside, not to return for 250 pages, and so is any pretence at effort. We cycle through interchangeable narrators, circle the same static event. Realisation dawns. That light on the horizon isn’t a new star. It’s a literary supernova – the entire Knausgårdian project entering spectacular, all-consuming heat death ... with no aura of performance to protect him, the inadequacy of his technique is exposed ... This is a book bloated with the inconsequentia ... Forced through narrative contingency to do anything other than list, Knausgaard panics and goes pre-verbal, leaning his elbow against the keyboard and hoping for the best ... Erected on a fatally weak linguistic foundation, the novel can only ever be a structural catastrophe. As if aware that his creation is crumbling, Knausgård buttresses it with occasional eldritch events. At best these are merely lazy...At worst they are unimaginative and offensive ... Finally, after casting aside language, paragraphs and multiple plot lines begun but never developed, Knausgård goes all in and abandons his novel, reconstituting his leftover intellectual gristle as a wholly indigestible \'essay\'. It’s notionally by one of the book’s characters, but it scans as pure Knausgård-ese ... Most unsuccessful artworks are simply flawed – a good idea undone by poor execution; an ambition beyond one’s ability. The Morning Star is different. Its failure is total and totalising. This is not an idea that has fallen apart in the execution, it’s a novel that dreams of having an idea, a novel that, over hundreds of pages, seeks meaning in everything from the boiling of an egg to the passing of a soul into the afterlife, only to come back empty-handed ... It’s a cruel irony. Knausgård is known, most of all, for his willingness to bare himself. Now, just as he excises his semi-mythological persona from his work, he stands unflatteringly revealed. Once exhaustive, he is now simply exhausted. There are no quivering lattices of light here. There are not even green leaves, or a blue sky. The Morning Star is a dead planet, Knausgård its burned-out sun.
Joy Williams
Rave The Guardian (UK) On the surface of it, Harrow...seems unlikely to broaden her audience. This is not to say the book is not brilliant—it is. It’s simply that Williams has made no concessions; she remains wonderfully and determinedly herself ... Williams’s method is one of adjacency more than linearity. Language, not narrative, is the connective tissue. To read her is to be flung every which way: from the spiritually profound to the farcically bizarre ... Every sentence is lathed into sleek and startling perfection ... Even seemingly offhand phrases glitter ... Zeroing in on our collective complacency and denial, Williams is both wry and merciless ... This life we’re not aware of is Williams’s great subject. She peels back the visible and known, revealing death and chaos beneath ... Part of what makes Williams’s work so destabilising is that agency has almost no significance. Navigating a world that makes no sense, her characters are lost and baffled, their actions and ideas stripped of meaning ... Harrow reminds us that, as a consequence of climate collapse, trauma and grief are the condition of our collective existence. As our world disintegrates, it will take what we think of as reality with it. Addressing this in fiction will be the job, partly, of a certain kind of modern mystic. Williams—great virtuoso of the unreal—is one of them.
Rachel Cusk
Rave The Guardian (UK) On the surface, then, this is a novel of glaring privilege, steeped in a mode of middle-class existence so rarified that the \'lower things\' must never be allowed to intrude. This is, however, a Cusk novel, and in Cusk novels the surface, as experienced by reader and characters alike, invariably proves too fragile to be trusted. Second Place, it turns out, is a novel less about property, and more about the boundaries and misplaced emotional investment for which property is a proxy ... The novel’s emotional nuance, its stylistic poise, has been as perfectly and painstakingly constructed as the life it describes, only to be blown apart by a flat and shattering statement, weighted around a central, immovable truth ... Towards the end of the novel, the narrator says of L, whom she both admires and loathes, and by whom she knows herself to be loathed in turn: \'He drew me with the cruelty of his rightness closer to the truth.\' We might say the same of Cusk, our arch chronicler of the nullifying choice between suffocation and explosion. Her genius is that in deliberately blurring a boundary of her own – that between a writer and her subject, between the expectation of autobiography so often attached to writing by women, and the carapace of pure invention so often unthinkably afforded to men – she tricks us into believing that her preoccupations and failings, her privileges and apparent assumptions, are not our own. By the time we realise what has happened, it is too late: our own surface has been disturbed, our own complacent compartment dismantled. It is a shock, but as the narrator of Second Place reminds us, \'shock is sometimes necessary, for without it we would drift into entropy\'. Cusk is necessary too – deeply so, and Second Place, exquisite in the cruelty of its rightness, reminds us why.
Deborah Levy
Rave The Guardian (UK) Deborah Levy’s exquisite new novel The Man Who Saw Everything – her seventh, and her third in a row to be nominated for the Booker prize – both unmasks and confronts [the] convenient denial of individual culpability ... Saul’s life, we come to understand, functions as a kind of psychoanalytic mirror of Europe, with events in the material world finding their emotional counterparts in his disordered memories ... Towards the end of the book, when Saul attends an exhibition of...photographic work, he thinks: \'There is a spectre inside every photograph.\' The spectre, of course, is the subject: Saul himself. Levy’s singular achievement in this novel is that it is not simply these spectres that shapeshift. Saul’s entire emotional and psychological topography is unstable, questionable, and within that fluid context, everything has the power to haunt ... Levy’s writing is, no doubt, deeply attuned to human anguish and loss, but her real talent is to remind us of fiction’s other great function: the loosening of boundaries ... Perhaps, Levy seems to be saying, we have gone about things in the wrong way. Instead of resisting cruelty and injustice at a national or global level, it’s possible that each of us might need to endure the same process of disassembling as Saul, so that we can see, as in the clear light cast by this novel, the awful power we have over others, the unthinking emotional destruction we are capable of wreaking, the regimes we not only suffer under, but enforce.
Jeanette Winterson
Rave The Guardian (UK) Frankissstein is a fragmented, at times dazzlingly intelligent meditation on the responsibilities of creation, the possibilities of artificial intelligence and the implications of both transsexuality and transhumanism ... As is to be expected from a novel both constructed from and beholden to the nebulous realm of ideas, there are moments when the book’s speculative nature threatens to overwhelm its sense of tangible reality ... As a result, readers may occasionally begin to feel rather disembodied themselves, immersed in the deoxygenated atmosphere of pure thought. Winterson’s great gift as a writer, though, is the ability to inject pure thought with such freewheeling enthusiasm and energy that ideas take on their own kind of joyous life. Frankissstein abounds with invention ... Such is Winterson’s comfort across modes and forms, she’s also able to leaven the hyperinvention of rogue science with deeply evocative historical realism balanced by hilarious, almost bawdy set pieces ... this is a work of both pleasure and profundity, robustly and skilfully structured, and suffused with all Winterson’s usual preoccupations – gender, language, sexuality, the limits of individual liberty and the life of ideas.
Rachel Kushner
Rave The Spectator Rachel Kushner’s third, extraordinarily accomplished novel, The Mars Room, glows with the kind of authentic hyper-detail only a good deal of hanging out can capture ... Kushner’s great skill lies in her manipulation of focus. Through the accretion of small detail, she builds a formidably systemic world view, one in which capitalism is both merciless and inescapable ... Her project is to show how those rhythms collide, and what happens to a person when they do. She succeeds beautifully.
Ross Raisin
Rave The New York Times Book Review This is a bold novel, one that confronts and inhabits a distinctly British masculine unease ... A Natural is overtly concerned with shame. It picks at the conflict between socially conditioned masculinity and gay desire. As is noticeable in the sex scenes between Tom and Liam, this is a space in which pleasure is seemingly impossible...For about a third of the novel, this feels uncomfortable. Raisin risks diluting queer experience to a washed-out sadness. In emphasizing shame over pleasure, he gave this reader concern that a distinctly heteronormative gaze was being manipulated...As the book progresses, though, Raisin’s careful path through self-imposed pitfalls becomes clear. The way is lit by his keen perceptions; the novel suggests the frustrations that arise when lived experience fails to align with what was imagined, and analyzes the gap between spectatorship and participation ... What enables Raisin to navigate such fraught terrain is his deep and unwavering empathy for others, and an ability to find flashes of beauty in life’s unforgiving ugliness. His language might be spare, but his turn of phrase is strikingly elegant ... If Raisin has chosen to focus on that which stifles rather than frees us, he has done so to demonstrate precisely why we need all the things that society and circumstance suppress.
Kate Tempest
Rave The New York Times Book Review In Tempest’s London, no one is insignificant; everyone has a story. The devotion and care with which she recounts these tales may initially seem distracting, but the cumulative effect is deeply affecting: cinematic in scope; touching in its empathic humanity. The city, for better or for worse, makes these people who they are, and they in turn make London the city Tempest unflinchingly evokes: cold, gray, profoundly lonely, but shot through with homely chatter and rare warmth...Tempest’s voice — by turns raging and tender — never falters. By the time the novel reaches its cleareyed climax, cleverly undercutting its own promised happy ending, the reader is left with the impression of a work that hums with human life.