PositiveThe RumpusIt reads...as if its author were inventing the novel from scratch ... Ought to make for a miserable reading experience, but instead it’s strangely propulsive. DeWitt’s prose in Your Name Here deliberately eschews the beauty of her previous works: it’s plain, full of abbreviations and German loanwords and in-jokes.
Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Trans. by Ottilie Mulzet
PositiveKenyon Review... profoundly, unsettlingly off-kilter, even in terms of the dark vision of his other novels. This is a novel that has orchestral movements, often discordant ones, unmarked perspective shifts, and puzzling undertones ... this isn’t a novel in which there is a possibility of redemption. If it has a major flaw, it is that its portrayal of the daily lives and quotidian thoughts of its narrators is less compelling than these moments of intense disruption and upheaval. Krasznahorkai is at his best in describing tumult, or the dark, unswept corners of the mind ... I was disappointed to feel that compassion sometimes missing in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming. At other moments, however, the novel’s rage is convulsively persuasive.
