PositiveThe Washington PostPlaying With Reality is a foreboding prehistory of AI. Clancy conveys how we became so in thrall to gaming that we forgot where the field of play stops and the real world begins — who gets to be a player and who is merely being played.
Andrey Kurkov, trans. Boris Dralyuk
RaveThe Washington PostA gripping whodunnit with surrealist flourishes ... Kurkov brings to life an overlooked and much-contested episode in Ukrainian history, capturing the brutality with which Soviet forces first attempted to establish control over the city.
Maria Stepanova tr. Sasha Dugdale
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksBeautifully translated by the poet Sasha Dugdale, the book teems with oblivion ... In Memory of Memory might be read as a eulogy for our obsession with the past, one of those rare works that narrates its own disillusionment with its subject ... On the final page, she ends her love affair with memory and secures her release. Her reader is left behind, caught in the crosshairs of memory, wondering if the oblivion to which Stepanova has steered is curse or gift, heaven or hell.
Alex Halberstadt
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... is most interesting where it documents lives other than Halberstadt’s own ... Halberstadt’s most serious misstep occurs in the epilogue, when a Volga fishing trip with his estranged father takes him to what used to be the Mongol city of Sarai Batu. This precipitates an abrupt and bizarre journey through Russian history, in which Halberstadt claims that an array of attributes sometimes displayed by modern-day Russians date back to the Tatars, from high cheekbones to their aversions to foreigners, to discussing the past, to democracy...It is one thing to suggest that trauma is passed down from father to son, to explore how the memory of terror lives on in one’s own life. It is quite another to suggest that this inheritance can apply to a diverse and varied nation, to describe all Russians as a \'people trembling seemingly without cause, like the lab mice at Emory\'. Alex Halberstadt’s own reporting suggests that not all Russians experience history in the same way, and that those who do tremble have good cause indeed.
Masha Gessen, photographs by Misha Friedman
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement\"Gessen’s delicate prose and deft skill as an interviewer combine with Friedman’s haunting photography to produce a partial record of the ruins of Soviet prison camps in Sandarmokh, Perm and Kolyma, and of the fraught memorialization efforts that followed perestroika and the Soviet Union’s collapse ... Friedman’s large-scale monochrome photographs capture these fragments in haunting detail, blowing them up as if to magnify the paucity of information they contain. Never Remember is a chilling verbal and visual archive of what Walker calls \'the Russian case of forgetting.\' \
Elisabeth Asbrink, Trans. by Fiona Graham
PositiveThe New RepublicWhat is unusual about her book is that she creates a sense of history unfolding in real time. Asbrink presents scenes from around the world alongside one another, making for juxtapositions that are sometimes ironic, sometimes damning, and always tinged with sadness ... Memoir is not Asbrink’s strength. Her reflections on traumatic inheritance, on the unreliability and loss of memory, on the paucity of language for the crimes of the 20th century are often overwrought; she needlessly strains to underscore the gravity of her subject when in fact the history, riddled with ambiguities and cruel ironies, speaks for itself. But without her short diversion into personal history, Asbrink’s work would seem incomplete. Her difficulty capturing the contingency of her father’s life, and her own, has a way of bringing author and reader closer together ... Asbrink’s contribution is to underscore the contingency of the post-war period, to give it a fitting form, and to show that we must learn not only from what happened, but also from everything that might have been.
