PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... sparse and only lightly fictionalized ... canters along smoothly enough. Much of it is laconic and somehow wilfully prosaic, assuming something close to Onoda’s soldierly viewpoint without presuming to get too deeply inside his head. This is effective – we are trusted to find the subject as interesting as Herzog does – and seems decent. Then there are occasional dithyrambs on the theme of nature’s chaotic sublimity, which are harder to take: \'Crickets scream at the cosmos\' and so forth. These seem more about maintaining the Werner Herzog brand than about the intrinsic needs of the book ... Onoda certainly makes a good Herzogian protagonist, even if a heart attack at the age of ninety-one isn’t exactly a Herzogian end. As to whether there is more to his story than just another man in uniform who carried on doing what he should have known was wrong because he was only obeying orders – that may be a question for others to decide.
Zadie Smith
MixedThe Literary Review (UK)Grand Union doesn’t quite have the flavour of a mid-career retrospective, though Smith’s many strengths are everywhere visible in it. It’s more like the boîtes-en-valise Marcel Duchamp used to make – little leather cases containing miniature copies of his best-known works – or an even more venerable prototype, the Kunstkammern of Renaissance Europe, micro-collections that purportedly bundled up all the wonders of creation in one exquisite cabinet, but always ultimately functioned as portraits of their patrons ... So if you’ve read any of Smith’s longer fiction, or any of her writing really, you’ll be hard put to see the present anthology as any sort of interlude or episode within the larger corpus; rather, it serves as a figure for the whole ... some tremendous comic writing and snappy dialogue, and a range of themes and devices with which you may already be familiar ... a few determinedly artless forays into genre ... there’s at times a slight sense of distorted perspectives, of over-concentration, as if Smith had passed her material through the alembic once too often in an effort to fit it into the bottle ... Last lines are often bathetic to the point of tweeness ... The level of originality and observation seems to me much higher in the UK-based stories than in those set in America, where the mythopoeic force of cinema and television is stronger.
