RaveThe BafflerCall it hybrid, genre-bending, unclassifiable—those totemic labels of the contemporary literary zeitgeist fall short ... An anti-novelistic novel, that most sly of creatures—straining to shed its own carapace, yearning to be something other than what it is ... The novel itself thinks. That might sound like sophistry, but there is something to it in Riverwork, whose fugitive cartographies have a mind of their own ... Jagged and doomed to incompletion, at times ponderous and florid. I array these descriptors only to suggest that its self-avowed failing might be the emblem of its beauty.
Iman Mersal
RaveAsymptote[A] quality of whispering, of slipping through, inhabits Iman Mersal’s angular The Threshold, a collection of poetry translated delicately by Robyn Creswell ... Mersal’s work is unafraid of its own promontories and edges. Often, the writing advances a crepuscular view of the self, ever-partial and shrouded in semi-obscurity, divided from its figurations ... Vacillating between the abstract and the resolutely material, scissoring the poetic plane, might be a signature of Mersal’s mercurial style ... Fugitive turns and inflections and trailings-off, preserved so scrupulously in this translation, seem to catch the words red-handed at their own game.
Charif Majdalani, tr. Ruth Diver
RaveAsymptote Journal... a compelling mélange of memoir and historical reckoning in Ruth Diver’s clear-eyed English translation ... Majdalani is great at conjuring an atmosphere of unease, the sense that something is about to give ... Regardless of how much one knows of Lebanon’s troubled past, the succession of dates gathers an ominous velocity, hurtling toward its doomed end. Yet the text’s desultory form, delivering in poignant fragments day by elastic day, hour by ordinary hour, preserves an essential uncertainty—perhaps even a hope that the future might yet be otherwise ... Rereading the diary, I find that ambiguity instructive; the present carries the past’s unresolved baggage. That nuance, unfortunately, seems lost in translation...Diver’s translation, otherwise, is smooth and readable, and does justice to the anxieties that lurk at the heart of Beirut 2020 ... what Beirut 2020 reassembles from the wreckage is a composite image of collective survival, exercises in making sense of incomprehensible suffering.
