PositiveThe Telegraph (UK)It’s a passionate, jostling and flamboyant piece of work, set in Nigeria during the military rule of the Nineties, which conceals a subtle state-of-the-nation allegory in its tale of a progressive family driven to disintegration by a folk prophecy ... There’s a tinge of Shakespearean or Greek tragedy to such a prophetic set-up – with the fatal flaw being the father’s presumptuous ambitions for his children. There is also a succinct postcolonial allegory, as the sprouting seeds of division and dissatisfaction begin to tear the family apart. But The Fishermen is anything but programmatic in its concerns. The overwhelming impression it leaves is one of vitality, profusion and abundance, as Obioma’s narrative leaps about in time, teases with digressions or surrenders to purple enthusiasm ... Even if this doesn’t win the Booker, I’d be astonished if other prizes don’t await Obioma down the road.
Walter Isaacson
PositiveThe Telegraph (UK)Though Isaacson deeply admires his subject’s achievements, they are in constant danger of being eclipsed by the arresting ghastliness of the character that accompanied them. Because Jobs, as this account mercilessly attests, could be a world-class asshole: and after the gushing obituaries, breathless tributes and comparisons to Leonardo, Edison and Elvis that attended his death this month, that is news ... Isaacson organises his material well and writes with a pacy, demotic style, though the speed with which this book was rushed out after Jobs’s death is occasionally noticeable at the copy-editing level. There are moments of poor discrimination — a sterner editorial eye on the segments about office design might have been desirable, for example — and Isaacson’s choice of rousing chapter titles from Shakespeare, Dylan, Yeats and the Beatles seems laughably pompous ... Taken as a whole, though, this is a riveting book, with as much to say about the transformation of modern life in the information age as about its supernaturally gifted and driven subject.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
PositiveThe Telegraph (UK)This glow fades slightly in the third volume of Min kamp, a book in which the real-time nature of Knausgaard’s project demonstrates its own knock-on effect. Composed in the eye of the publicity hurricane that followed the first two volumes, this is a notably safer novel. The slackening in the drama is palpable ... What’s missing is the fervent and searching examination that the Knausgaard of the first two volumes brings to his project’s legitimacy.
Yuri Herrera, trans. Lisa Dillman
MixedBookforum\"At times, the deliberately cartoonish lines of Herrera\'s narrative seem to strangle its ambition. The Redeemer and his cohorts are less characters than archetypes...And despite the tension produced by the intersection of Herrera\'s baroque style and his evasive approach to narrative, the book never quite achieves the fusional dazzle of its predecessor. Yet there\'s plenty to admire about this allegorical vision of a country under lockdown, where everyone has \'readily...accepted enclosure,\" and where violence and death have ceased to be motors for fiction, instead becoming the backdrop of everyday life.\
