PositiveThe Village VoiceLetters to His Neighbor, brilliantly translated by Lydia Davis, is a collection of beseeching letters that Proust wrote to his noisy upstairs neighbor, a dentist. The letters are inadvertently hilarious in their hyper-genteel poise; we see Proust at his most desperate, charming to the extreme, an effect no doubt amplified by Davis’s elegant prose ...these letters endear us to him and his struggle for peace.
Leopoldine Core
PositiveThe Village VoiceCore’s stories enact domestic dramas that read like miniature plays perceived through a keyhole. Conveyed in close third-person, the plot is often revealed through dialogue between two people ensconced in confessional spaces... Using rapid-fire repartee that recalls Truman Capote or J.D. Salinger, both of whom influenced Core early on, her characters set out to beguile one another until they change course, their words suddenly weapons for wounding ... Perched precariously on the knife blade of desire, where people toggle between love and hate, Core’s tales are never predictable ... A common thread throughout the book is a deep anxiety about time, which threatens to impinge upon each character’s pursuit of love.
Katie Kitamura
PositiveThe Village Voice...such cool detachment employed in a story about a broken marriage has a curious effect. It's counterintuitive and unsettling, but also surprisingly apt, as the story swirls with secrecy and sublimation ... The novel coyly suggests that this inability to 'move on' may be a uniquely female problem. Though her tone is unswervingly calm and collected, the narrator's thoughts nevertheless reveal a quiet panic that stems from frequent eruptions of guilt. There is her anxiety about having 'moved on' too quickly ... I am haunted by the ending of Kitamura's novel, just as I am haunted by the final image of Elena in the Neapolitan novels, Elena who sits alone in her elegant house on the hill, writing of the vicissitudes of love.
Yoko Tawada, Trans. by Susan Bernofsky
RaveThe Village Voice\"With its whimsical leaps of logic and wobbly focalization, Memoirs of a Polar Bear offers a welcome reprieve from the sharp, exacting contours of the linguistic realm (where the primary enterprise is sense-making), enveloping the reader in a softer, snowier landscape of love and longing in its purest form.\
Javier Marias, Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa
MixedThe Village Voice\"The final revelation about the troubled Muriels and the sinister Van Vechten, when we finally arrive at it, is both shocking and utterly disappointing. The crime seems not only predictable but unforgivably banal, especially after four hundred pages of buildup. One wonders if the blunt impact of the revelations is a result of our own jaded, scandal-saturated present. Or, perhaps, Marías is simply demonstrating the nature of secrets ... If novels can be calls to action, then this one is a clarion for open dialogue. Brought to light, the unspeakable immediately becomes banal. Perhaps this is Marías\'s hope for Spain — that one day it will confess all its secrets, and in doing so, let them go.\
