Rave4ColumnsBriggs refuses what for most authors would be THE story: how Helen came to be a single mother. There are so many possible plotlines ... But, that is not this story. The deep, abiding love affair here is with Rebba, Helen’s best friend and former roommate ... Her book feels like a manifesto for something distributed, open, radical.
Dorthe Nors tr. Caroline Waight
Rave4ColumnsThe book and its themes make me think of a tiny saffron salamander, the red eft, that lives on my land, and that creature’s deep sense of place ... In her stories, the characters are often women in danger of disappearing into middle-aged invisibility. They are also funny, written with almost blunt affectlessness that, at least in translation, hews to the Danish habit of not drawing too much attention to oneself ... Each chapter is pieced from elements that seem random yet are so carefully constructed that to quote them neuters her writing’s power.
Édouard Louis tr. Tash Aw
RaveFrieze... unflinching ... slender, moving ... elegant writing ... fantastic translation ... this is a liberation tale suffused with love for his mother and her escape.
Lynne Tillman
RaveFrieze... unflinching ... Part memoir, part manual, the personal account opens up to warn us all of the hardships of caring for a sick parent. Tillman, who’s known for her wildly inventive fiction, has never before written about her own experiences. Here, her ideas can turn and flare out to encompass contradictions, such as the book’s generosity towards the doctor who nearly kills her mother ... Even as I know how the story will end, it grips me ... In Tillman’s hands, too, the idea of progress or narrative time is undermined. After all, what is progress to the dying person? The story loops and circles as if mimetic to how time dissolves for the sick, their family and caregivers ... I am always grateful for stories that undo narrative time, chronological time, bound as they are with notions of progress and capitalism ... Tillman writes bravely about the impossible economics of care as women’s work and its enduring legacy tied to capitalism and colonialism.
Sheila Heti
Mixed4ColumnsIn Sheila Heti’s new novel, Pure Colour, the writing is warm, deft, and strange, but the characters are thin and the plot is too ... The language is fable-like, as our time is transformed into mythic time ... With a parent’s dying (not to mention the world’s ending), the book might be called \'how should a person grieve.\' Mira’s father dies, and that loss is everything to her, to the book—and to me. I suspect to Heti as well. Her father died as she was writing, and the chapters dedicated to Mira’s mourning are Heti’s most profound ... The storyline is episodic and abrupt ... She meets the enigmatic Annie ... However central to the story Annie is, she feels like a device, brought in at key moments to advance Mira’s character or an idea in the novel ... [Mira\'s] relationship with her father is chromatically rich ... With his death, she finally grasps this pure color of his promise, the rich hues of our deepest moments in life ... Heti has said that she prefers sparse writing with few descriptions, so that readers can picture themselves in scenes. The richness of the grieving, though, is in its specificity, no matter how minimal the writing. These passages stand in sharp contrast to the rest of the book ... In realist fiction, characters get to deflect their emotions onto the objects around them, making it clear how they feel without an author telling us directly ... But Heti rejects such techniques, and Mira gets no space to disagree ... Pure Colour’s true search is for the meaning of art in an age of grief, personal and global.
James Pogue
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksAs narrator and participant, Pogue comes across as a slacker socialist, given to driving around the West and staying on public lands that make up nearly half of all territory in the Great Basin ... His personal story can seem like padding the narrative or trying too hard to justify his compromised choices in Malheur, but he has the luck of being in certain places at certain times, empathetic enough to understand what he sees unfold before him. At a time where right and left, urban and rural seem hardened into distinct sides, Pogue serves as a translator ... land buyouts are happening at the behest of environmental groups. I can see both sides with the ranchers and in Pogue’s retelling. The beauty in his writing is in how he earns their trust and takes seriously their concerns ... Pogue struggles with why we can’t talk to the other side; why the militia groups can’t see the bigger issues, the corporate capitalism that fuels the injustices the occupiers lament ... Left out of his narrative are the Native Americans like the Northern Paiute, whose territory spread far across eastern Oregon and northern Nevada and who’ve been in the region for some 10,000 years.
