PositiveSouthwest ReviewCárdenas might be said to be writing in streams of consciousness (note the plural), in which threads are woven in an often-dazzling performance akin to a DJ’s mashup, in which two different songs can be heard separately as well as together ... As he revisits the events of his life, Antonio interrupts himself with asides, questions, and literary references, which are themselves beset by further intrusions. The result is a fragmented narrative marked by the liberal use of em dashes and parentheses, the latter used to capture this nesting-doll effect of thoughts embedded within thoughts embedded within thoughts ... An irony of this style is that as it seeks to portray a mind frazzled by emotional stress, it demands nothing less than the complete focus of the reader. Fail to notice a reference to a film Antonio mentions having watched recently, for example, and you will be at a loss when, a couple of pages later, Antonio summons the protagonist of that film in making a comparison to his own life.
Kathryn Scanlan
RaveSouthwest ReviewKathryn Scanlan writes sentences so delicious that you want to roll them around your mouth like an expensive chocolate. Each of the pristine, compact stories in her debut collection, The Dominant Animal, links one ingenious grammatical construction to another in a chain of virtuosic prose. Scanlan follows in the tradition of earlier meticulous sentence-crafters such as Diane Williams, Barry Hannah, and Gary Lutz, employing a self-conscious, stylized mode of expression that is especially attendant to the sounds of words and juxtaposition and that is, above all, concerned with the avoidance of clichés and all well-worn phrases. All writers revise, naturally—and revise, and revise, and revise—but reading The Dominant Animal one gets the sense that every sentence has been worked over and polished to an extreme degree ... could be read in a couple hours, but I wouldn’t recommend it. There are forty stories packed in here, and they take time to digest. It’s almost as if each one needs to be read first for the pure physical pleasure of Scanlan’s language, and a second time to get at what she is intending to convey through the characters and situations described ... At times the book seems to present itself as a fanatical experiment in proving that you are what you eat. And the frequent unflinching references to the digestive system’s rude conclusions imply a darkly realistic perspective on where an obsession with the fleeting joys of consumption will lead you ... While a hardcore animal-rights activist might seek to prove to you how animals are like people, Scanlan shows how people are like animals ... With their bizarre scenarios, vibrant imagery, and insightful metaphors, the stories in The Dominant Animal operate as exquisite specimens of high literary art. If they falter, it is in their habitual refusal to let us into the minds of their characters ... In the effort to create one startlingly precise turn of phrase after another while bowling the reader over with the potency of her metaphors, Scanlan too often overlooks the internal, necessarily prosaic grappling with life that gives characters dimension. She leaves us on the outside of these characters, looking at them the same we way look at our pets, asking ourselves, \'What are they thinking now?\'
Virginie Despentes Trans. by Frank Wynne
RaveSouthwest Review... it is obvious at least to me that Despentes’s trilogy should be a bigger a deal than it currently is. Brash, provocative, heartbreaking, the Vernon Subutex books offer a biting taxonomic portrait of twenty-first-century society that should resonate as much to American readers as European ones. While the specific milieu portrayed is contemporary France, the book raises internationally relevant questions about community in the age of social media, the importance of authenticity in art, and shifting notions of racial and gender identities. Despentes writes with an unrestrained vibrancy, shifting among a large cast of characters in a careening free-indirect discourse that often devolves into brilliant monologuic rants. In our current age of exquisite autofiction, in which the window of what certain authors are allowed to write about given their identity sometimes seems to be narrowing, Despentes’s rainbow-colored character tapestry comes off as refreshingly rebellious.
