PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... grim. But Eli, who notices everything and speaks in a kind of hyperactive journalese, is still somehow open to the world, and frequently amusing as a result ... The anxieties of adolescence are persuasively conveyed ... One can’t help quibbling that the story seems designed with an eye to its own presumed dramatic adaptation. The violence is occasionally too much. Toward the end, a plot point involving severed limbs is downright fanciful ... Such florid unpleasantries feel all the more gratuitous because the most compelling aspects of Boy Swallows Universe come from real life ... In this thrilling novel, Trent Dalton takes us along for the ride.
Toshiki Okada
MixedThe New York TimesA 30-year-old woman calls in sick to work and stays in bed all day. A couple enjoys four days of no-strings-attached romance after meeting at the theater. Although his plots aren’t much to speak of, the Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada’s first prose work to be translated into English roams into some dark, even disturbing, crevices of the mind ... Okada’s style is hyperrealistic, punctuated with \'likes\' and \'whatevers,\' and structured, like everyday speech, around rambling sentences that often go nowhere. He has spoken of the difficulties of translating his work into other languages, because of its \'super-real\' style.. But this translation by Sam Malissa has a strange rhythm all its own. That End of the Moment was once a play comes through in its shifting perspective, which moves swiftly, drone-like, among characters. It’s the more successful of the two narratives — compact, ruthless, governed by a persuasive sense of dread. In that sense, Okada captures the ennui that has paralyzed a generation.
Michelle de Kretser
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe émigré is one kind of traveler, portrayed here with sympathy and lyricism. But de Kretser, who was born in Sri Lanka and came to Australia at 14, saves her startling satirical firepower for another — the expats of the global West, or those who can travel on a whim ... Pippa is as close as de Kretser gets to a protagonist. It is Pippa’s friends, colleagues and acquaintances whose stories we learn via impressionistic flashbacks. In the late 1990s, when we meet her, she is an idealistic undergraduate in Sydney who announces 'I love India' after watching a documentary on TV. Over time, she becomes a more interesting character, a full-fledged writer who seeks experiences in the world with which to animate her fiction. Yet Pippa remains naïve. She preaches empathy for refugees on Facebook, but is careless of the inner lives of others ... For a novel concerned with dislocation, there’s a lot of grounding humor in The Life to Come. Most of it comes at the expense of Pippa and her ilk, but de Kretser’s observations are so spot on, you’ll forgive her even as you cringe.
Richard Flanagan
RaveThe New YorkerFlanagan’s prose in Narrow Road has often been described as ‘unflinching,’ and there’s certainly no shortage of violence in the passages about the prison camp, but he can be unflinching about desire, too. What strikes me most is the way Flanagan writes about the vivid and terrifying experience of falling in love … Flanagan’s tender, direct way of writing about the body is reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence, and some have found this side of his work a little embarrassing, even cheesy, but I’m moved by Flanagan’s sentimental men, known in the beginning as numbers and by the end revealed to possess secret wells of sentiment. In Narrow Road, Dorrigo is celebrated for his machismo and for being a paragon of his gender: brave, strong, stoic. Australians traditionally value hyper-masculine men who don’t expose their vulnerabilities, and Flanagan is deliberately writing against type.
