PositiveZYZZYVADeath Fugue is worth reading for its unconventional portrayal of post-Tiananmen-Square China alone ... the book feels disruptive indeed ... Keyi seems to enjoy writing from Mengliu’s salacious eyes, eyes that prefer to consider how a woman’s posture creates her cleavage more so than the implications of a forced miscarriage or self-immolation. Fun for the attentive reader is the special power deferred to the female characters by Mengliu’s cluelessness ... Death Fugue will be all too relatable to a Western reader. Entreaties for resistance while memories of injustice remain fresh are hardly unknown here. And when Beiping’s media leans on their favorite, counter-public-opinion experts to favor the police, when unmarked vans round up peaceful protesters, or when urban and rural citizens split over the value of revolt, Keyi’s world doesn’t seem distant.
Matt Bell
RaveZYZZYVASentence-level epics form on every page, the prose floating between beatific and elegiac ... Hoping to remove the comfortable distance from nature felt from inside the Anthropocene, Appleseed dissolves the barrier between world and body, body and mind ... The novel’s sentences escape the mind and recruit the senses ... Where Appleseed is not relatable, it is entertaining. The sci-fi is inventive, the fantasy alluring, and the odd formal choices—one-off chapters from minor characters, rapid tone shifts—surprisingly fluid. In one novel, there are terraforming witches and self-replicating amalgams of humanity’s collective consciousness. Thanks to Bell’s confidence, the novel’s distinct components form a cohesive whole. With his self-assurance, Appleseed can convincingly wax philosophical on birth, death, and consciousness; draw parallels to contemporary policing and corporatism, then link the two; and deliver a hundred still-enticing pages from an unvarying frozen wasteland ... Most impressive, however, is the coexistence of this confidence with Appleseed’s sincere passion (which begets vulnerability) for environmental improvement. The novel leans into this vulnerability, listings its fears for coming extinctions, a bleach-white sky, and the pending apocalypse. The novel’s ambitions are frightening ones. Trying to reconcile our existence with the damage humans are bound to cause poses thorny questions.
Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel
MixedZYZZYVAMurakami’s narrators are hardly fit to narrate, so distracted are they by...images and their other peculiar dispositions ... First Person Singular is full of layered women who write evocative Tankas and create outlandish scenes. But rather than ponder those actions, these speakers’ minds return to some daft, sexualized facet of the original image ... Murakami generously seeds mysteries that evade the narrator and challenge the reader ... His prose often relishes its own oddness, expounding its philosophy in opinionated blocks ... If they are not talking-monkey-on-a-kleptomaniacal-quest-for-love bizarre, the stories mash up incongruent narratives or perform daring experiments with chronology and form. They challenge the precision of memory and ask readers: are we what we remember? Are we the same person who transcribed the memory? Even if you know not what of, Murakami’s new collection is certain to make you wonder.
Josef Pla, trans. by Peter Bush
RaveZYZZYVAAided by Peter Bush’s remarkable new English translation, Salt Water serves as evidence for what Pla might still achieve in the canon of Western literature ... Even in Salt Water’s more essay-like entries, the plot progresses because of peculiar characters so distinct that, a page after meeting them, Pla does not need to indicate who is speaking ... Of course, the prose shines in part because of the translation. The language is precise and beautiful, and a reader gets the sense that little was lost in translation when language-based jokes remain intact ... even in English, Bush does not betray [Pla\'s] devotion.
George Saunders
RaveZYZZYVA... a warm introduction to the Russian masters of literature—warm as a house party ... Saunders is a generous guide inspired by his love of the short story, whether masterful or imperfect. As he scans the seven stories included in his book, Saunders has fun as he works for ways a prospective writer might create similarly enigmatic stories. Neither inefficient nor blocky, these discussions are the source of the book’s meaning; they flow effortlessly, more like an impassioned conversation than a lecture. His explanations escalate, as though this bright-eyed, overly-energetic writer is leaning over the coffeehouse table, gesticulating widely as he whisks his reader onto yet another caffeinated adventure ... Perhaps the writing feels so approachable because Saunders views himself as a student rather than a teacher ... With his own humble additions, he generates what feels like a comprehensive encyclopedia of all the world’s knowledge on the craft, purpose, and effect of writing—the three of which, Saunders notes, are vastly different areas of study ... It is impossible, of course, to explain the creation of a masterwork using only the final product, but Saunders never fails to extract wisdom from a reading.
Charlie Kaufman
RaveZYZZYVAReading Antkind is a bodily thing, so full is it of gut and heart. For once, the cliché front-cover epithet proves true—Antkind will make a reader laugh, then cry ... Memory is funnier here than in most places, and Antkind’s unconventional understanding of it makes for a remarkable reading experience ... A reader might not expect such a massive book about (apparently) so little to compact anything, but the laughs are dense. (Best practice: do not read Antkind somewhere you should be quiet) ... about memory and comedy, but, like any massive postmodern tome, it is about everything else, too—corporatism, the consequences of digitization, visibility, unselfish love, fascism, self-aggrandizement, loss, social anxiety, Truth, \'the hope of brilliance and the fear of never being understood\'—it seems as though everything is stuffed in these pages. Antkind is a heavy book but, fortunately, it has enough jokes to feign lightness
