PanBookforumSligar, it seems, has added all the correct ingredients to create a book that will appeal to the left-leaning millennial reader. But the result feels less like a novel about actual people than a book designed by algorithm ... This could have made for an enjoyable, well-paced thriller, but Sligar keeps tripping over her own attempts to seem ultracontemporary. Her portraits of 2017 are full of references that usually feel a little off ... the bigger problem is Sligar’s one-dimensional treatment of contemporary social issues. Take Me Apart seems ready to tackle big topics—#MeToo, race and representation—but in the end it’s not clear what Sligar wants to say about them ... The novel’s treatment of racial inequality is similarly superficial ... By trying so hard to please, with synthetic pop-culture asides and woke political takes, Take Me Apart overburdens the engrossing mystery at its heart. \'Our contemporary moment\' does call for an urgent response. Novels that tell people what the author thinks they want to hear are anything but.
Jean-Jacques Schuhe, Trans. by Jeffrey Zuckerman
RaveBookforumIf Millennial Pink captures something of 2018’s youth zeitgeist, then according to French author Jean-Jacques Schuhl, winner of the 2000 Goncourt Prize for his novel Ingrid Caven, the late 1960s and early 1970s might be characterized as the years of \'dusty pink.\' His cult classic of the same title, first published in 1972 as Rose poussière, and now available in its very first English translation, is a patchwork of his musings and meditations on the London and Parisian undergrounds of that era, formed through vignettes and prose poems that blend fact, fiction, and fantasy ... Translator Jeffrey Zuckerman has done an admirable job of making Schuhl’s jagged, reference-laden prose comprehensible and meaningful to English-language readers, ensuring that Schuhl’s voice comes across in all of its peculiar uniqueness, rhythm, and loveliness.
