RaveThe Women\'s Review of BooksAzareen balances an unerring willingness to explore obsession with an uncanny knack for creating layers and layers of gorgeous and simple physical description ... Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is master, capable of the most sophisticated swerve into commentary on the nature of time, of political economies, while in the midst of the sweetest litanizing description—shameless and sculptural in its abundant aptitude for saying what’s there.
Can Xue, trans. by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen
RaveThe Paris ReviewIn Love in the New Millennium everyone is a wit, especially children, and everyone has thought deeply about things. The surface is deep. To speak in operatic utterances is the norm. They have great names: Mr. You, Fourth Uncle, Little Rose, a vagrant is named Long Hair ... Part of the difficulty of reading Love in the New Millennium was that I couldn’t stop tweeting passages. To be a reader was to become a trailer, and to become an actor, too. It’s irresistible, the way one enters this laughable, shifting no-time where everyone inside is talking about like the weather. It’s also very boring, as a plotless book is. A circling, nonbuilding narrative gets tiring. What’s the pleasure, then? Humor and surprise. It’s a frankly poetic existence ... There’s a matter-of-fact instrumentality about self in this book. One is as wry about existence as existence seems to be about the humans that occupy it and eagerly fill the pages of its novels.
