PositiveHarpers... a jumpier, less cohesive story, with different styles and texture on offer [than in McGregor\'s previous books], and a reconfigured cast in each of its three main sections ... In the closing section, Robert can take charge of his identity again thanks only to the communal endeavors of the female therapists and caregivers. This would seem to offer Anna a somewhat restrictive model of female heroism, so McGregor is careful to make her a complex character, ambiguous in her responses, withdrawn, and as bad as Robert is at reading social cues ... Robert, however, is a simpler character. Until aphasia makes his thoughts a mystery, he comes across as the sort of person who’s chillingly exposed in early John le Carré novels: an emotionally evasive Englishman who has given all his loyalties to the Institute and to a dream of adventure. In the last third of the novel, McGregor constructs a moving, well-observed drama of rehabilitation around him. There are some astonishing technical feats ... Throughout the book, McGregor returns to language’s incommensurability to experience. It’s iterated obsessively in many different ways ... It’s easy to imagine how McGregor might have arrived at this theme as a means of connecting the Antarctica material to the aphasia material. Whether or not it completely works, and whether or not you can sustain momentum while going from ice floes and leopard seals to a support group in Cambridge, the eerie withholding of moral judgment makes Robert’s failure of character difficult to forget. Robert feels an ecstatic, almost pantheistic sense of oneness with the land ... It’s a sign of McGregor’s skill, and his unforced sense of the mystery at the heart of things, that the novel leaves the reader feeling much the same way.
Martin Amis
MixedThe London Review of Books... the book’s unsettled relationship with fictiveness doesn’t come across as a game or a get-out clause ... Amis doesn’t try too hard to persuade the reader that this is all of a seamless piece. Instead he adds more seams ... It’s hard to arrive at a measured view of all this. The barrage balloons of fame or notoriety following these people around keep getting in the way, and there’s always so much going on. Even after the book’s last four or five resolutions, Amis finds room for another argument with himself about Israel, two passages (one reprinted) on Elizabeth Jane Howard, and a post-postscript describing a dream about her dog. Another difficulty is the range of Martin Amises on offer. Here he’s a distinguished, thoroughly normcore man of letters, there he’s a feral, muscle-flexing cult writer, and there, there and there he’s in various in-between states ... He takes an unpretentious, anxious interest in holding the reader’s attention, and from time to time he can still get out from behind the rhetorical afflatus and come at you with sheer voice.
Martin Amis
PositiveLondon Review of Books... the book’s unsettled relationship with fictiveness doesn’t come across as a game or a get-out clause ... Amis doesn’t try too hard to persuade the reader that this is all of a seamless piece. Instead he adds more seams ... It’s hard to arrive at a measured view of all this. The barrage balloons of fame or notoriety following these people around keep getting in the way, and there’s always so much going on. Even after the book’s last four or five resolutions, Amis finds room for another argument with himself about Israel, two passages (one reprinted) on Elizabeth Jane Howard, and a post-postscript describing a dream about her dog. Another difficulty is the range of Martin Amises on offer. Here he’s a distinguished, thoroughly normcore man of letters, there he’s a feral, muscle-flexing cult writer, and there, there and there he’s in various in-between states ... He takes an unpretentious, anxious interest in holding the reader’s attention, and from time to time he can still get out from behind the rhetorical afflatus and come at you with sheer voice.
J. M Coetzee
PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)Like the earlier books, The Death of Jesus doesn’t offer much help in ascribing a meaning to the novels’ world and David’s place in it. Is David really exceptional? Does he remember things from another life? Is he a pawn of forces from another sphere of being? These questions are left open ... It’s as though we’re on the other side of one of the logical impasses to which Coetzee often brings his readers, and which he gets past by saying, let’s just imagine we’ve got past it ... Irony, analogical thinking, ‘a certain attitude of reserve towards the real’: it doesn’t seem to me a bad description of what Coetzee is up to in these novels. The absence of ‘ideological commitment’ is relevant too, because one of the main features of the new life is that it rules out the things Coetzee dealt with in the books that made him famous: history ... There are lots of strange, funny moments ... They suggest that, as well as having more of a sense of humour than he’s sometimes credited with, at this stage in his writing life Coetzee might be more interested in giving his unconscious a shake and seeing what falls out ... there’s something for everyone ... who doesn’t walk around with a name and a birth date they were given in circumstances they don’t remember?
Stephen Kinzer
MixedHarpersKinzer’s trashily written but absorbing book combines moral outrage about these episodes with moments of pure comedy. To the question of how the national security apparatus came to think it important to find out how LSD affected elephants and Siamese fighting fish, the book offers various answers ... Throughout, Gottlieb himself remains a cipher: \'a scientist who ate yogurt\' ... Kinzer ends his book with a surprisingly measured judgment of the former \'psychedelic Mengele\' [.]
Cecelia Watson
PositiveHarper\'sWatson...has gotten the historical background from Malcolm Parkes’s unbelievably learned Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West. Instead of doing a historical survey, though, she skips from Manutius to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grammarians in order to get rules-based pedantry in her sights early on. In tone, her book is closer to Lynne Truss’s jokey Eats, Shoots & Leaves than it is to, say, David Crystal’s levelheaded Making a Point ... But her chattiness is much less annoying than Truss’s, and her argument runs in a different direction.
Greg Grandin
PositiveHarpersGrandin’s history of the frontier \'in the mind of America\' unravels [Frederick Jackson] Turner’s thesis—with due acknowledgment of its poetic qualities—and puts Trump’s white supremacy in a longer perspective ... As a corrective, Grandin’s book balloons into a short history of the United States, with an emphasis on the racial terror, official and unofficial, that marked the story from the start ... Grandin isn’t short of eye-popping evidence for the \'blood-soaked entitlement\' that underpinned [the American \'frontier\'] ... Grandin—a gifted scholar and storyteller who’s best known as a Latin Americanist—writes powerfully about anti-immigrant nativism’s return from the margins as a \'border-fication of national politics.\'
Yiyun Li
RaveHarpersA beautifully written book that runs a quizzical eye over the urge to deal with sorrow by writing beautiful sentences, it’s closer to the essays gathered in Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life—which deal, by way of Li’s interest in certain Russian and Irish writers, with an experience of suicidal depression—than it is to her more self-effacing novels and short stories ... Nikolai emerges in vivid fragments ... Some of the writing is sharply aphoristic, and there are some hair-raising sentences ... Some readers, she knows, will interpret these dialogues as symptoms of \'insanity or religiosity,\' not as high-wire acts performed over an unimaginable drop. The tone is hushed, domestic, affectionate, with no Dostoevskian scenery-chewing or Tolstoyan efforts to nail down the meaning of life. All the same, you get a sense—as one of Coetzee’s characters says of the Russian masters—of being brought to a \'battle pitched on the highest ground.\'
Adam Sisman
PositiveHarpers“In the Sixties and early Seventies, when such figures had more clout, le Carré was writing on a different level, and the best parts of Sisman’s biography detail the circumstances that gave The Spy and Tinker Tailor their lightning-in-a-bottle quality.”
