PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksLast Words on Earth is a good novel. It works. It’s a kind of fan fiction, though perhaps we won’t call it that because fan fiction is low class, and Bolaño is high and literary (and instead of recycling the author’s characters, it’s the author himself who is raised from the dead and reanimated). But like fan fiction, it works because it satisfies, because it answers questions that otherwise go unanswered in the holes and omissions (and final foreclosure) of Bolaño’s life story.
Fiston Mwanza Mujila, trans. by Roland Glasser
RaveGuernicaTo match the rhythms and polyphonic noise of Tram 83, Mujila bends and cracks the language, producing a feverish Joycean prose that can be dizzying, wearying, and brilliant by turns. It’s always excessive: he wears out the language, and the language wears you out ... Set in a nightmarish wet-dream of a \'hooker-bar\' nightclub, Tram 83 can seem like a novel about fucking and music and precisely nothing else ... as a meditation or debauch on the nothing that is left behind when everything falls apart, Tram 83 is a literary manifesto, or at least a literary revelation ... a wildly inventive and gleefully amoral farce, Tram 83 is also a deadly serious anatomy of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s mining frontier. It is political to its core, committed and \'relevant,\' while also being a glorious mess and a lot of fun ... Elusive, intense, brief, and insubstantial, these moments of community, imagined and real, are the novel’s beating heart, the moments when shit turns to diamonds: buried under 50 years of disappointment, oppression, and struggle, weighed down by facts on the ground and watered with blood, Tram 83 is the paper on which the Congo continues to exist, the song of ourselves which Mujila sings and celebrates.
Johannes Anyuru, Trans by. Saskia Vogel
PositiveSan Francisco Chronicle... while the first 30 pages are a grueling, minute-by-minute account of the attack, the rest of the novel becomes something strangely slow, contemplative and peaceful ... turns a novel about terrorism, time travel and alternative realities into something even stranger than those things: a philosophical meditation on hope.
Helen Oyeyemi
RaveThe New Republic[H]er broken little stories come so devastatingly alive, even while remaining so achingly incomplete. Life offers no resolution, and keys and locks spend most of their time not finding each other. Dreams never come true. But as 'if a book is locked…' suggests, there’s probably a good reason for that, don’t you think?
Lina Meruane, Trans. by Megan McDowell
RaveThe New Republic\"...the triumphant realization of a stunning artistic vision, a novel as black and bitter and bloody (and beautiful) as its central conceit ... Seeing Red offers no answers, or judgement, of course; only an unblinking gaze into the abyss. But her exploration of what dependence does to love is harrowing. And as the novel winds to an increasingly torturous conclusion—dead-ending onto a twist I hadn’t anticipated until I was literally reading the words—her blindness becomes a metaphor, at last, for the tyranny of human frailty and need, the strangling hunger of bodies that break and fail, and the whirlpool of our shared mortality.\
