PositiveBrooklyn RailOffers a kind of picaresque ... As our amphibious narrator’s focalization shifts between the variously mouse-ish (Miss Peabody), devilish (Mr. Thompson), or reserved (Mrs. Morris) residents, and variously reserved or frazzled (Miss Frey) workers, the question such narrative modes always beg...is rendered ostensibly futile by/in old age ... For all of Jansson’s jokes, the tone tends mournful, or just depressed.
Sheila Heti
PositiveThe BafflerShe has not only alphabetized her diaries but also seriously and seriously playfully edited them, over another decade-plus: cut and curated the result of alphabetizing five hundred thousand words, by sentence, in a spreadsheet, into the 213-page spine-bound art object it is today ... The effects of Heti’s experiment are overwhelmingly many: variously delightful, strange, jarring (that’s the point), banal (that’s the point!), ecstatic, gut-wrenching, and almost always very funny—in Heti’s flip, exclamation-point-y and exclamation-point-worthy way ... Is this a novel? If it is, we might call it the ongoing coming-of-age story of an artist, a Künstlerroman. But totally fucked up. ... I was bummed when Heti ends Y, then Z, the book’s one-sentence finale, in a slightly overcast tone. With this finale, you get the feeling Heti met the inverse problem of I: not too many options.
