MixedBookforumDespite its obvious scholarly heft, [Bloemink\'s] writing is suffused with the joie de vivre often attributed to her subject matter ... If anything, the art historian may prove too polite a party guest, gently setting the scene, but letting the more intimate drama play out mainly offstage (for instance, we can never quite pin down the nature of Florine’s relationship with Duchamp). It is only in a few honest paragraphs in the epilogue, where Bloemink admits the artist wasn’t \'particularly nice,\' that we get a hint of the book that could have been ... what Bloemink salutes as feminism seems precariously pinned to Stettheimer’s personal privilege ... A stronger argument is her assertion that Stettheimer was dismantling notions of class in commodity culture ... but too often the artist is reduced to the sum of her work ... In the end, Bloemink’s special Stettheimer is still a Stettheimer worth knowing better.
Kapka Kassabova
PositiveBookforumThe author is a consummate adventurer and indiscriminate observer, as drawn to abandoned monasteries as to fast-food chicken joints. Talking to strangers is her métier; in kiosks, at curbsides, and in cafés, she harvests myriad little sagas, which cast their own light (or shadow) over a land it seems no one can quite definitively call their own ... The sweeping statements and capital-Q questions are par for the course, but where Kassabova’s book shines is in the casual precision of the author’s own observations. Her style is wily and imaginative, with sentences rapidly gliding into the unexpected ... Her witnesses are delightfully unreliable ... You learn to shrug and just be grateful you’re not the one who has to figure out how to get home for the evening. One starts to weary, however, when our adventurer’s gaze turns inward. If readers of Border felt the author to be as elusive as her subject matter, perhaps there was some relief in the quicksilver reportage; in To the Lake, introspection comes less artfully (\'To be female is to grieve\').
