PositiveThe London MagazineBanine’s childlike voice in Days in the Caucasus – sometimes to effect, sometimes sincere – serves to represent, in the same breath, the carefree exploits of childhood (a game of ‘who could spit the farthest’ and ‘secret orgies of tomato and aubergine conserve’) and the racialised, nationalised violences that impinge on them ... Banine’s numb depictions of the riotous, horrific, and historic are a standout virtue of Days in the Caucasus ... This tonal quietness is also at the heart of the beguiling humour and terror that attend descriptions of family dramas and feuds – another success in the book. It is perhaps at its most effectively arresting in its narration of abuse and violence ... The one danger of Banine’s brand of narrative flatness, however, is resultant ploddingness. And it’s one that unfortunately emerges: the second half of the book is stronger than the first, which, at points, dwells without purpose – even if this does stylistically represent the immobility of her childhood. At times, the book falls into a pit common to memoirs; that, however extraordinary the narrative, it becomes myopically slow ... There are some literary correctives, for sure. But they are hard-won.
J. M Coetzee
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...there’s no greater literary caution against easy conclusions than the Jesus trilogy — three novels that, in their Coetzeean combination of spare reality and higher-order philosophical fantasy, deny conclusion. One cannot read analogy and meaning from these books without eventually determining that one is incorrect ... The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus were fine instances of how Coetzee at once reveals and conceals truths in philosophical and mundane narratives. But The Death of Jesus has something additional, something that elevates it to the world-beating poignancy, something that late Coetzee had promised in books like Slow Man but never fully vouchsafed. This is a Coetzee that not only impresses and confounds, but also moves to tears ... amid all the postmodern biblical allegory, ethical quandary, and pursuit of truth, it is an old writer’s rendering of a parents’ relationship with their child, an interrogation of what those roles constitute, that makes this book extraordinary and enduring ... It is the humanity, in The Death of Jesus, that makes it poignant, known but unknowable, and extraordinary ... without adding too much to the wealth of Coetzee chatter, suffice it to say that J. M. Coetzee is still possibly our greatest writer, and that with the masterpiece that is The Death of Jesus, he reminds us why.
Pajtim Statovci, Trans. by David Hackston
RaveThe London Magazine (UK)... images not only figure Bujar’s interest in old-fashioned storytelling, but collide the messy worlds of human and non-human, value and waste, old and new. On a close scale, the concordant linkage of discordant ideas that figurative language performs shadows Statovci’s wider focus on the always-uneasy movement between worlds and identities ... The singular success of Crossing is its structure. Bujar and Agim’s tribulations are intersected with Bujar’s later lives (separated from Agim) in Berlin, Rome, New York and Helsinki. This structure marshals us enthrallingly to the thudding revelation of what happened in the central and first crossing of the Adriatic Sea in the summer of 1992, which is unveiled only in the book’s final page. It’s a well-trodden shape, of course (including in My Cat Yugoslavia), but Statovci’s contemporary version of the Albanian folkstories with which Bujar is preoccupied throughout...is so exceptionally well-executed and so thoroughly self-aware that it comes off consummately ... This is something that Statovci does, too; the normalisation of sexual violence both within patriarchal societies and in moments of national strife ... Statovci delivers such lines crushingly.
