PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... in this engaging and place-rich book, it is Adimi’s project to marry the sensuality and the intellect that young Camus fretted over, and to show that there are as many ways to be a bibliophile as to be a sensualist ... This voice of the urban guide bookends the work, maintaining the tension between what is to be absorbed carefully, and what is to be consumed quickly ... Though the book is carefully researched from what remains of Charlot’s papers, the research never feels heavy or academic.
Ben Lerner
MixedThe Kenyon ReviewIn The Topeka School, a majority of adult characters are psychologists, but even those who are not possess an analyst’s outsized belief in the power of language. Throughout the book, Lerner uses the thematic apperception test as one of his many refrain ... The book is full of exercises in language losing meaning, some more intentional than others ... Even though the story is replete with such value clashes—acid trips and marital infidelity and recovered trauma and white suburban teenagers in freestyle battles—The Topeka School comes to its climax tamely with a linguistic concession ... The novel may end on a hopeful note—the human microphone, a collective rather than confrontational speech act—but it is by no means a resolved note.
Mario Levrero, Trans. by Annie McDermott
PositiveThe MillionsEmpty Words is a very funny, very sad reflection on the ways people try (and fail) to simplify their lives ... Perhaps that is what Levrero thinks of self-help programs, that they become one more overbearing thing on an overwhelming to-do list. In the protagonist’s case, if he was trying to find relief from the emotional and intellectual work of life by reimagining handwriting as a Zen-like practice of \'invisible work,\' he picked the wrong manual task. Handwriting is the ultimate in visible work—script, scrawl, or chicken scratch, it is the tool through which thoughts grow visible and complicated.
