RaveUSA Today...The Buried Giant (four stars out of four), Ishiguro's first novel in a decade, is an engrossing narrative, implacable in its exploration of the same thematic territory (memory, guilt, love and war) that has always preoccupied him ...a fable for modern times set in the ancient past ...are complicated by a kind of mass amnesia that has settled on the land like a fog, robbing its inhabitants of all but the most recent of memories ...Ishiguro invests his tale with almost unbearable metaphoric weight. We long to remember the past, but if forgetting is a burden, it can also be a mercy... It's one of the deftest bits of sleight-of-hand in recent fiction, a literary tour de force so unassuming that you don't realize until the last page that you're reading a masterpiece.
Haruki Murakami
MixedUSA TodayBy most standards of traditionally wrought contemporary fiction, Colorless Tsukuru, which reads like an excellent short story padded to the more commercially viable length of a novel, ought not to work at all ...is repeatedly interrupted by lengthy and inconsequential episodes that stop the book's narrative momentum in its tracks ... Like a sloppy weaver, Murakami measures out several plot threads only to leave them coyly dangling ... That process, fortunately, holds this messy novel together in a way that will keep most readers turning the pages despite occasional stretches of impatient boredom ... a series of disillusionments that lead not to a physical place but to one of emotional and perhaps spiritual enlightenment. What's buried, Tsukuru learns, must be unearthed and confronted; otherwise it haunts us forever.
James McBride
PositiveUSA TodayOn almost every page, there's something to wince at or cry about — the barbarity was extreme on both sides of the slavery jihad in what are now Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and West Virginia — but also something that will make you laugh out loud … McBride's secret weapon in this act of fictional alchemy is Henry ‘Onion’ Shackleford, a light-skinned young slave who is freed by Brown only to get swept up — at first involuntarily, and later with varying degrees of consent — in a series of battles that finally ends, in a great commingling of comedy and tragedy, with Brown's famous assault on the armory at Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia.
Donna Tartt
RaveUSA TodayHaunted, guilt-ridden and prone to self-endangerment — much of it centered around the painting, to which Theo clings as a symbol of his lost, beloved parent — Theo takes the reader on a fantastic journey. It's full of moral confusion, hairpin plot turns and, best of all, a vivid, rather raucous cast of characters drawn with the fond yet gimlet-eyed insight of Charles Dickens, whose spirit hovers over this book like a guardian angel … Tartt manages to deliver wistful, always wise meditations on class divisions, the contradictions of the art world, the power of memory and the randomness of fate, in which life can take all sorts of seemingly disastrous turns and yet, in true Dickensian fashion, turn out all right in the end … The result is the best book of 2013.
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
PositiveThe Chicago Tribune...[a] fast-paced, well-researched account of the case ... The cat-and-mouse game between Regan and Carr, which concludes with a showdown at Washington Dulles Airport, is the electrifying core of Bhattacharjee's book. They were polar opposites in some ways, kindred spirits in others, circling each other like hunter and prey. Bhattacharjee understands their minds — Regan's mercurial, cunning, prone both to innovation and overreach, Carr's methodical and a bit plodding, yet steadier, the tortoise who wins the race.
Will Schwalbe
PositiveUSA TodayInstead of trying to dust off some forgotten tome and convince us of its value, he focuses on its pressing relevance at some critical juncture in his life. He isn’t arguing — and certainly not shilling — on behalf of a book or author; he’s passing on his own experience and leaving us to identify with it or not ... He conveys this humility with his easygoing, egalitarian tone and his high-low eclecticism, which ranges from Homer’s The Odyssey and Melville’s 'Bartleby the Scrivener' to E.B. White’s Stuart Little and Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train ... In the end, Schwalbe fulfills the promise of his earlier memoir with this new book, in which the communion of readers trumps even what they’re reading.
Michael Chabon
PositiveUSA TodayChabon’s least linear, most fragmentary novel, achieving its considerable effects by means of an accumulation of layers of feeling rather than from any sense of one incident leading to another and another ... Moonglow is ingeniously constructed...gives Chabon and his narrator leeway to leaf at will through chapters of the grandfather’s life without feeling obligated to connect the dots.
Christine Sneed
PositiveThe Chicago Tribune...[an] often heartsick, always gimlet-eyed new collection of short stories ... A tragic weight anchors all but a few of these stories (an exception is 'The New, All-True CV,' as acidly hilarious as Eudora Welty's 'Why I Live at the P.O.'), in which the battles are often over almost before they've begun — all that's left is to take stock of the carnage and bury the dead, less in anger than in sorrow. In that sense, Sneed is as much heir to John O'Hara and John Cheever as to many of the women writers, such as Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, who seem to have inspired her.
Don DeLillo
RaveUSA Today...a return to top form after a few misfires in recent years. Like many of its predecessors, this compact tale has more ideas, argument and speculation stuffed onto nearly every page than you might find in an entire shelf of sci-fi novels ... Zero K is anchored in emotions as old and primal as humanity itself: the fear of death, the passionate love of a man for his wife, the conflicted love of a son for his father. These rich veins of feeling flow like an underground river through the novel’s eerie, futuristic terrain.
Yann Martel
MixedUSA Today...the conclusions we draw from these philosophically open-ended stories will say as much about us as about the author’s intentions. They are either coyly nebulous or, if you prefer, deliberately deferential to the reader’s biases, particularly with regard to religion and its utility (or uselessness) as solace for the grief-stricken. All of that said, The High Mountains of Portugal can be a rich and rewarding experience for those willing to suspend their natural hunger for narrative momentum, instead idling along with Martel as he spins his magic thread of hope and despair, comedy and pathos.
Paul Goldberg
PositiveThe Chicago Tribune...the plot, while substantial, exists largely to serve Goldberg's meditations on history and culture, the dark mystery of racial and ethnic prejudice, and the ways in which human comedy and human tragedy are often so intertwined as to be almost indistinguishable ... The Yid is as hilarious as it is appalling, and vice versa.
David Mitchell
PositiveChicago TribuneIt's a welcome change of pace. There's something lovely about a speedy read that you can finish in a single sitting...and that doesn't require a cosmic road map at each hairpin plot turn. The last thing we expected from Mitchell is simplicity, but here it is, burnished to a hellish bronze.
