PositiveNew York Review of BooksGarcía Márquez deftly registers the fluctuations of Ana Magdalena’s joys, reservations, and disappointments on this journey of self-discovery ... But although Until August is a remarkable book, it does not find its author at the peak of his abilities. It is praiseworthy but not the masterpiece it could have become if he had not been ailing and could have afforded his female alter ego the sort of treatment Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary received.
Alexa Hagerty
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe stories of these excavators of the past are told compellingly in Still Life With Bones, along with the stories of those willing, despite death threats and intimidation, to defy the authorities who abducted and murdered their loved ones. Hagerty understands that the bones of the violated dead do not murmur or sing to us unless the living struggle day after day against forgetfulness, against the impunity of other sorts of hands that also proliferate in her book ... With such an array of subjects and perspectives, Hagerty has wisely opted to unravel her odyssey in visceral vignettes. Besides the advantage of freeing her voice to slip back and forth in time and space, her narrative, thus fractured, reproduces the traumatic, dispersed experience of the bones themselves, and the interrupted lives of the survivors. But such a strategy can also lead her to end some segments with more drama and metaphors than necessary ... These moments do not detract from the power of this haunted and fascinating book.
Nona Fernández, tr. Natasha Wimmer
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewOvercome with revulsion, I resolved to forget that name, Andrés Valenzuela. As if banishing him from memory could deny his ferocious persistence. Because here he is again, the protagonist of Nona Fernández’s novel The Twilight Zone, translated fluidly into English by Natasha Wimmer ... Could anything original still be expressed on the subject? ... In fact, The Twilight Zone is wildly innovative, a major contribution to literature, in Chile and beyond, that deals with trauma and its aftermath. Fernández, whose previous works of fiction have been admirably iconoclastic, belongs to a generation of prominent Chilean writers ... In order to hold together the novel’s interlocking fragments, all those lives endlessly trapped in \'dense, circular time,\' Fernández deploys a brilliant literary strategy. She conjures up samples of popular culture, primarily from the TV series The Twilight Zone, and turns them into portals to another dimension ... It is up to us to risk entering that history and its blaze, to accompany her into that terrifying landscape and try to communicate with its ghosts.
Javier Cercas, trans. by Frank Wynne
RaveThe New York Review of Books... fascinating ... A singular tension...pervades the back-and-forth narrative, in which the cunning Marco tries to distort and conceal what really happened and Cercas, with his incantatory prose, strips away every fraudulent ruse. He is careful, all the while, to be fair and judicious ... Readers will be impressed by how scrupulously Cercas pursues the facts, in obvious contrast to Marco’s incessant obfuscation. By questioning his own motives and methods at every step, by making sure to separate what is indubitable from what is conjecture, he shows us how to systematically dismantle any web of lies, constructing a model of \'reflective skepticism\' from which we have much to learn in our era of rampant conspiracy theories and viral Internet falsehoods ... The Impostor tells a deeper and hidden truth about Spain ... The Impostor [is] a book that is woefully relevant well beyond the frontiers of Spain.
Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Trans. by Anne McClean
PositiveThe New York Review of BooksReaders might expect...a noir detective novel that investigates a crime that has gone unpunished for seventy years and restores some semblance of justice. Nothing, however, is that orderly in The Shape of the Ruins, which subverts the crime genre, presenting the hunt for culprits within the frame of what seems to be a Sebaldian memoir ... Throughout the novel we see the narrator (or is it the author?) trying to isolate himself and his family from the past that threatens to devour him and from the violence broodingly incarnated in Bogotá, described as a cemetery city, murderous, schizophrenic, poisoned, deceitful, furious, blood-stained ... Halfway through the book, the investigation into [Colombian politician] Gaitán’s murder comes to a standstill. It is now that the novel swerves in a startling direction ... Vásquez executes a risky literary maneuver that pays off brilliantly ... Vásquez, for his part, has no problem embracing the titanic intellectual ambition of the great Latin American novels of the past, exploring, as these works did, the ways in which the grand events of history intersect with individual lives in all their intimacy and lay waste to them ... The Shape of the Ruins is suffused with the hope that there is a way to escape the traumas of the past as well as the fear[.]
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewA welcome addition to the vast literature produced by jailed writers across the centuries (Boethius, Cervantes, Gramsci, Soyinka, Solzhenitsyn, Peltier), this book has several traits that make it special. Ngugi does not wish to enthrone his experience as unique. Instead, he sees his detention as a mere link in a chain of previous internments dating back to the British occupation of Kenya and continuing under the corrupt post-independence regime. A third of the book therefore describes, not his own daily ritual of endurance, as most memoirs of this sort do, but a history of repression and resistance in his homeland, strewn with exhortations to liberate Africa from foreign domination. This formulaic repetition of revolutionary rhetoric — a bit wearisome even to this sympathetic reader — has, admittedly, an organic function. Ngugi is affording us a glimpse into how a prisoner of conscience, by stubbornly reiterating his convictions, keeps faith with the ideals that those in power want him to betray ... This thrilling testament to the human spirit had, for me, a fierce resonance.
