RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksMuch of Carnegie Hill is about secrets and private lives; one of the most satisfying parts of its composition is in the author’s clear desire to keep elements of these lives private enough that we are seduced into endearing ourselves to the characters both despite and because of their incomplete personas ... What is most striking about Carnegie Hill, in the generous and oft-comedic voice Vatner brings to the work, is the way marriage becomes not just an institution that wears tedious as time goes on, but a place unto itself that only begins behind the doors and elevators of an old building ... He succeeds in not only rendering these characters’ intimate flaws, but also giving them, and their secrets, a half-life that has immense potential to endear them to the reader ... as much a New York novel as Wolfe or Salinger or Helprin have given us, conveying not just the landscape of Manhattan and its domestic innards, but of its inhabitants and their many imperfections.
Svetlana Alexievich, Trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksAlexievich is a gifted listener and writer with a phenomenal sense of rhythm and repetition. The testimonies she brings to us are, to a degree, stylized ... And yet these narratives do not read as \'art;\' they are the lived moments of Soviet and post-Soviet citizens, unforgettable accounts of disaster, war, hunger, and bloodshed ... what Alexievich’s hundreds of interviews offer is a unique sort of collective sorrow—not one voice, one memory, one perspective, but the war viewed through a field of eyes ... Alexievich...withholds express judgment; she simply selects, artfully ... Last Witnesses is a sustained, belated Kaddish, a lament for all that is lost to children when they are subjected to the most extreme forms of human cruelty ... Last Witnesses asks us to confront ourselves in every decision we make—what we buy, who we buy it from, where we donate, whom we hate, how we love. If we instigate or participate in abuse, or if we turn a blind eye to it, how will we be remembered?
