RaveThe Independent (UK)Many of these fictions are about mildly transgressive loves ... Munro\'s stories have long spans; they have also tended, over the last decade, to be genre-defyingly long. But there is a rediscovered economy of expression at work in this outstanding collection, with the most satisfying stories filling about 25 pages. Her technique with time is remarkable: she continues her fictions where others would conclude, sliding from near-closure to epilogues in which the haunting truth of an unresolved mystery is uncovered.
Clarice Lispector, Trans. by Katrina Dodson
PositiveThe Independent (IUK)[The stories] often verge on the surreal; strange or supernatural elements are introduced slyly into the lives of her urban characters. A quirky realism is equally in evidence. [Lispector] avoids the grand magic realist flourishes of her Hispanic contemporaries – the weirdness of her worlds is calculated ... The darkly humorous underpinnings are not unlike the fiction of her close contemporary, Lygia Fagundes Telles, though the latter seems ultimately best at the shorter forms while Lispector is at her very best in novels. Translator Katrina Dodson tells us that Lispector\'s language is more conventional in her stories, which possibly makes this volume a place for the uninitiated reader to sample the Lispector canon, before embarking on a longer journey with the hidden genius.
Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Trans. by Eduardo Aparicio
PositiveAsymptote JournalThe novel—so fragmentary and discursive that some critics found it that they don’t see it as a novel at all—is composed of a series of notebooks. It begins with twenty-three pages of records of deaths, murders, brutalities, before it embarks on its circuitous narrative path ... The novel is at times baffling, infuriating; at others, it leads the reader into the maze of its confidences with great assurance ... It is to the translator Eduardo Aparicio’s credit that he captures the various registers in which Rey Rosa operates ... in Aparicio’s precise, spare translation—in whatever form, fragmentary chronicle, jottings, or fully evolved novel—the lost and scattered stories [Rey Rosa] has gathered have reached his readers.
Sara Gallardo, trans. by Jessica Sequeira
PositiveAsymptoteGallardo’s meticulous returns to the historical moments in which her texts unfold rescues her work from the whimsy which some of her Latin American contemporaries use as a default mode ... Some of the stories, which span the centuries, are less than a page long ... poignant and emblematic ... Along with violence and melancholy there’s humour here as well ... The very short story, at which Gallardo excels, is a gift to the poet as it makes no necessary demands of narrative muscle ... But in this story the reader might well feel, after a twenty-page journey, deprived of the conventional satisfactions that parts of the narration, and its Perrault-like title, promise ... there are times, as in this story, when the reader has the feeling of being lost in a vaguely nightmarish dream that doesn’t quite reveal the reason for its own menace ... it was evidently the author’s intent to create her own variant of a many-voiced ocean of stories in the manner of the ancients, with facets that echo, reflect, and collide with each other. It’s a massively ambitious, and often successful, task.
Tahmima Anam
PositiveThe GuardianThe Bones of Grace is a long novel; intricately structured, it attempts to reassemble all its floating clues and end at its starting point, with its heroine reconstructing an elliptical past and searching for an elusive future. In a sense, Elijah represents the reader, who has to understand the narrative burden this novel shoulders: personal destinies and public roles, national and international economies of desire and labour, and – perhaps most compellingly – the shadows of a traumatic past which nearly destroyed a nation.
