Rave4ColumnsClare Cavanagh has been spinning Zagajewski’s poetry and books of essays into commonplace miracles of translation for going on thirty years ... It’s a collection filled with elegies and remembrances and dedications to loved ones ... Zagajewski’s words came to me unbidden so many times over the last year, which was a year of difficult losses, a year of writing eulogies, for different types of mothers in my life, most recently my mother-in-law. It’s like he was scripting what I saw, and making it more beautiful.
Ray Nayler
Mixed4ColumnsAs the Nagel citation would suggest, one of Nayler’s master themes in this convoluted adventure is the enigmatic nature of consciousness, so it makes perfect sense to use the octopus as foil for and analog of the human mind ... It is a difficult thing, though, to take the filmy, incidental feeling of faddy interest and make of it something rich and colored-in, deep and dimensional, more lasting and compelling than a viral video. I’m not convinced that Nayler’s attempt fully achieves that ... the hologram of his writing starts to glitch if you read too closely. The same figures of speech are repeated ad nauseam ... Violent imagery (of which there is no short supply) is expressed in terms so curious as to become funny ... It’s not that Nayler can’t write. The short paragraphs from the invented nonfiction books by Ha and Mínervudóttir-Chan are, by contrast, lucid and lovely—I’d eagerly read them in full, if they existed. And his many interests here are fascinating, especially in the way he’s tangled them up together ... It did not bother me so much that these topics are as algorithmically tuned toward a reader like me as the very idea of an octopus novel is; this is a case where the algorithm has won, all these things tingle every pleasure center in my brain. Nor that, ideas-wise, Nayler has basically just remixed some of recent trade nonfiction’s greatest hits. What bothered me was the cool glassy thinness of it all ... It’s the intricate lacework of feeling Miéville manages to elaborate that I was missing from Nayler’s book, which ends with a tidy moral lesson...Doesn’t such a moral require a profundity of feeling? ... There’s much good argument against reducing all the possibilities of literature to the trite humanistic application of empathy-building. But at the same time, how exquisite it would be, to feel an octopal overwhelm at the yawing of meaning—and what besides the world-splicing of writing could let us surmise that?
Olga Tokarczuk, Tr. Jennifer Croft
Rave4ColumnsCroft’s dazzling translation of this staggering, thousand-page metatextual novel, with its symphonic composition of linguistic registers, into the confines of English is a superhuman feat ... If nothing can truly be known in The Books of Jacob, the alternative Tokarczuk advances is that we can try to understand better—by ceaselessly crossing the border, being other in the world, never taking refuge in the comfort of still familiarity. Stasis is inimical to the kind of understanding that is necessary for life to flourish; in stasis breeds the terminal germs of fascism, which thrive in the lie that there is such a thing as an unchanging truth. There is melancholy in her uprootedness, of course; in feeling yourself foreign. There’s a keening songbird of a word for this feeling, tęsknota, which appears in the Polish version of the novel. You can’t suffer its bruise in English translation; words like longing or missing don’t contain the same ache of distance. It’s what happens to your heart when you feel your own language break in your mouth. For Tokarczuk, though, it’s a condition of being human—it’s the soul-pain of freedom.
Anna Della Subin
Rave4Columns... a work so singular as to be nearly phosphorescent ... her most ambitious and searching project yet, and it is also a writerly feat ... the narrative contained within this orderly structure cartwheels around time and space in a way that gives the impression of a rushing fever dream or a mystical vision. Yet Subin’s sentences are never blurry—they’re brisk, precise, and wondrously nimble, defying the staggering density of detail (historical, literary, weird, funny) that they carry. That Subin is so attentive to how she crafts her language is in keeping with her advancing of the argument that this system of signs is, in fact, what belief is made from ... the narrative starts to shimmer and shapeshift until the book takes on yet another, unexpected purpose, transforming from what at first might have seemed like an eccentric collection of historical footnotes into a bold retelling of the creation story of our current reality ... Hers is, ultimately, an optimistic message: if our genocidal world was created out of a half-believed linguistic maneuver, surely we can muster the will to disbelieve it, so we may write something better.
Stefano Mancuso tr. Gregory Conti
Positive4ColumnsCould it be . . . is there any chance . . . that a glimmer of hope is still to be found . . . in the Kingdom Vegetabile? Might the wordless, motionless vegetables, so long considered mere \'things,\' come to our rescue? This is the bracingly cheerful premise of the latest book by the storied pioneer of plant neurobiology, Stefano Mancuso ... here [Mancuso] goes a step beyond the study of vegetal minds into complete anthropomorphizing ... Mancuso lifts his gaze from a minute inspection of the flora to take a more global perspective, intertwining his fresh narrative with strains of thought drawn from biological history, ethnobotany, postcolonial theory, sociology, and philosophy ... Mancuso’s fluent multidisciplinary approach, relayed in warmly relatable prose, is evident ... Mancuso [...] insists that, through significant reorganization, will we be able to provide for all.
Tao Lin
Rave4ColumnsTrip, Lin’s first properly nonfiction book, probably isn’t going to convert any haters—it’s still full of angular idiomatic ticks (his trademark stiff tone and mania for quantifying things in numbers, to name a few). And there’s that awkward self-consciousness that sometimes makes you feel a little embarrassed, like you’re reading an undergraduate term paper. But for those predisposed to Lin’s peculiar voice, it’s also probably the most personal, engaging, and sophisticated thing he’s written so far. To be clear, I’m squarely in the latter camp ... a key to what the book is about, beyond the quiet despair of ordinary life and drugs’ power to cure it: it’s about a young writer on a quest to understand his obsession with translating experience into language, and trying to find the best way to do so ... In his efforts to record those experiences, Lin eschews the rigorous refusal of adjectives and figurative language that defined his earlier novels, trying here to create a much richer textual world ... Trip is thus a document of an evolving process ... It is also calmly beautiful—fracturing loneliness and humming with hope.
