RaveRain TaxiRenowned Proust translator Lydia Davis reproduces the author’s idiosyncratic usage and orthography faithfully, mimicking the improvised quality of these dashed-off letters with a slashing verve ... The real magic of her afterword comes in its coda, which tells the story of the grandson of a Norman florist reading extracts from these letters online and subsequently disclosing Proust’s flower-buying habits and etiquette with the Williamses and others, noting the thirty-two times that he visited the shop between 1908 and 1912. Unearthing these intricately revealing records is the true Proustian pursuit, redeeming Davis’s mini-gospel of its few apocryphal lapses and elevating this volume’s host of testamentary material to nearly the level of the letters themselves. A tiny reliquary, this book’s illuminated codex now serves as a minor pilgrimage for all true Proustian communicants.
Thomas Pynchon
MixedThe Minneapolis Star TribuneFocusing on the New York of 2001 and early 2002, Bleeding Edge is a new kind of historical novel, delving into the radical shifts in human consciousness brought about by the Internet, video games, quake films, digital espionage, cyber exploration and other ‘bleeding-edge’ technologies that just 12 years later now actually seem generations old. Hilarious references to Netscape and ‘Final Fantasy’ abound, but 9/11 looms large and the stakes here are real … Maxine and her family, friends and colleagues are also surprisingly rich and well developed as individual characters who stand for something much more human than some of the cardboard cutouts of Pynchon's early works. This new earnestness comes at an artistic cost, though, making this novel almost entirely conventional in terms of how it works and what it offers the reader.
José Eduardo Agualusa, Trans. by Daniel Hahn
PositiveThe Minneapolis Star TribuneLooping through a series of spirographic circles, Agualusa's narrative draws the story of Ludo's self-confinement into the starry revolving sphere of her adopted country's revolutionary and counterrevolutionary growing pains, encompassing diamond smugglers, government assassin/torturers, disappearing poets and redeemed mercenaries within its scintillating web … An outlandishly orchestrated series of coincidences brings all the revolving characters together into a confrontation outside Ludo's recently opened door, yet the resulting resonances are as profound and affecting as that in any conventional flesh-and-blood chronicle … Agualusa is a master of varied genre structure, and he has great fun shifting from spy novel to pastoral narrative to interior reflection, but his heart is deeply invested in his characters.
Vladimir Nabokov, Olga Voronina, Brian Boyd
RaveStar TribuneVladimir and Véra’s full-spectrum love is one of literature’s greatest stories, and incorporating nearly every aspect of for-better-or-for-worse, this monumental volume wildly surpasses its every expectation.
