About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Adelle Waldman
Positive The London Review of Books Waldman returns again and again to the ways of capitalism in her examination of romance in this micro-milieu. What does courtship look like in a world where people worry about breaking up in light of how much they’ve ‘invested’ in a relationship? In which the ‘market rate’ of everyone – women especially – is as unarguable as a number? And how delicious is it to read a story in which neither of the lovers is particularly loveable, just as there’s nothing loveable about their environment ... It’s exciting to come across a book that binds dating and politics. Formally, not just factually, it’s important that the author is female. This is hardly the first book in which a woman inhabits the mind of a man, but here it seems we’re never meant to forget that a woman is behind the writing. Just as we later see Nate outsourcing his conscience to the women around him, it’s as if the novel’s subject – the dissection of the male psyche in the context of dating – has been outsourced to Waldman, a writer who has the talent to write about anything but was given this subject because she is a woman; because the men in her milieu who have written about Nates haven’t looked so closely at the pain these men cause: her book is less an apologia than the case for the prosecution. It is methodical; Waldman has done the work of imagining so we can all understand this sort of guy’s behaviour and mentality. It’s almost a public service.
Fleur Jaeggy, Trans. by Gini Alhadeff
Rave The New Yorker Few writers push the reader away with the coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy of Fleur Jaeggy. In her new story collection, I Am the Brother of XX, she praises her friend Ingeborg Bachmann, one of the most celebrated Austrian writers of the twentieth century, for needing 'little encouragement not to speak' ... In Jaeggy’s world, characters don’t change or have epiphanies—unless a sudden cruelty, a murder, or a suicide counts. They are as they are, and much of what they are is related to where they’re from—the soil in which they were planted ...are less gothic, less portentous, and less extreme in their cruelties... Her sentences are hard and compact, more gem than flesh. Images appear as flashes, discontinuous, arresting, then gone. Connective sentences are excised; there is sometimes a struggle to know where one is.
Ben Lerner
Positive The London Review of Books As in a video game, it’s not exactly what happens that counts: what’s important is how deeply you’re drawn into the world of the game, how transfixed you become. Adam is drawn deeply into his new world, and into his own thoughts. So are we: there’s tremendous verisimilitude in this short novel, and a pace that feels oddly familiar … mere moments after the transports of art have been acknowledged as possible, the idea that they might lead anywhere good – or bring any moral uplift or change in character – is quickly dismissed. There’s no evidence here that art, and therefore poetry, can save us … His anxiety and poses have just been a way of elaborating and extending himself, a drug more potent than his pot or his pills. Adam is not a poem. He’s a person. The American ideal of freedom and self-invention has its limits; he’s a product of his context and class.