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Recent Reviews
Fernanda Trías, trans. Heather Cleary
Rave The New York Times Book Review A well-imagined, often poetically beautiful plague story ... Trías’s protagonist is the shadow in all of us — the passive subject, suspended in the limbo of indecision, who cannot act to save herself.
Rebecca Renner
Rave The New York Times Book Review Every species, and every person who fights for its continued existence, deserves a book like this — a book that explores the complexity of the nexus between humans and animals and the exploitation of the wild, and considers the ambiguities of our fractured relationship to nature, morality and history.
Bernardo Zannoni, trans. by Alex Andriesse
Positive The New York Times Book Review A vigorous and intense story, even if it doesn’t always seem nuanced in its references to either animal nature or theological inquiry ... The novel’s musings about free will and suffering are murky, but there’s a powerful, cold clarity in Archy’s deadly encounters with other animals and the reflexive malice he brings to them. If evil doesn’t exist, then malice is just a fact of nature.
Karen Jennings
Rave The New York Times Book Review ... beautifully and sparingly constructed. The sections in the narrative present are a tactile evocation of the natural and material world around these two men; and in the flashbacks to Samuel’s coming-of-age and then torturous captivity, Jennings renders a gritty and stripped-down portrait of the bleak family dynamics and social conditions that made him who he is ... In Jennings’s hands, this antihero’s enmeshment in his own failures has a textured credibility that’s hard to look away from. At every turn he disappoints himself, as well as others; at every turn these disappointments settle atop each other like the bodies he buries beneath the stones ... a character study with the cross-cultural resilience of a fable, like Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes, operating on personal and symbolic planes at the same time ... No plot summary can do justice to a story woven this carefully, whose strength lies in its deliberate pacing and sharp dispensation of detail. Samuel is as real as a shaking hand.
Claire Keegan
Positive The New York Times Book Review Reading the story I felt immersed in a 19th-century landscape, rather than one set in the years of my own teens...Such homey quaintification of Irishness is a fairly familiar trope, but here it’s likely accurate enough: The country was still sunk in the past in 1985, when a doctor’s prescription was required to buy condoms. And Keegan’s prose, as she describes this trapped-in-amber world, is both nostalgic and practical: The scope of village life may be small, but its texture is rich...Moments of interpersonal contact shimmer like the dimming jewels of a sense of community that, for many of us, has vanished into bygones ... Curiously, by casting Furlong as a reluctant but good-hearted hero and the women around him as largely enablers and cowards — protective of their own children but otherwise seeing no evil — Keegan almost seems to suggest that in this community it was the women who were most keenly implicated in perpetuating the suffering of their own. Not only the nuns themselves, but the gossips and bystanders and repressed and fearful bourgeoisies like Eileen, who knew of the crimes and stubbornly turned their faces away ... As in Ursula K. Le Guin’s story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, this Ireland is a place whose cheeriness depends on the misery of its scapegoats.
Nick McDonell
Mixed The New York Times Book Review ... has the feel of a bedtime story spun to entertain, say, a niece or nephew, sprinkled with jokes based on animals’ bodies and sounds; but there are winks and nods for older readers in Easter eggs of punster humor throughout ... In its shape, the novel resembles an O. Henry short story or a movie like Planet of the Apes, with an ironic, dramatic twist at the end that’s not too surprising ... To child readers, this book might seem like all talk and no action, while to adult readers, it may seem too childlike, for The Council of Animals is a replicator, rather than interrogator, of fixed ideas about animals’ subservience to people and their roles as human instruments. Its levity of tone can be read as gentle handling or glib reduction, depending on your taste. For some readers, the story may land as a playful pantomime, meant to be received in that spirit of fun and seasoned with a thoughtfulness that’s broad but not too deep. But for those readers who may be discomfited by the casual use of animal figures as caricatures, and to those who, like me, are compelled by the subjectivity and uniqueness of other life-forms and are acutely anxious about their imminent peril at our hand, the book resonates more like a joke being told in the wake of an untimely death … and in the fleeting moments before the next death occurs ... As diversions for young readers, fiction has near-infinite license for silliness — to critique whimsical child’s literature straight-faced and primly feels foolish, like trying to scrutinize a prancing pink unicorn under a microscope. But since The Council of Animals has been likened to Orwell, though, the critical bar is set higher: McDonell — a journalist with a record of reporting on war and its casualties — clearly wishes to offer us more than child’s fare alone ... But through its inversion of the risks of current human activity — the conceit that human extinction, rather than the mass extinction of others, is the looming specter that haunts our kind — the novel enacts a kind of gamification of the tragedy of loss. This well-intentioned fable returns us once more to the arc of narcissism that has increasingly defined our dominant myths. Other animals and plants are being drastically, swiftly obliterated across the globe and may survive, in many cases, only in captivity or not at all as the coming decades unspool; but still people are the heroes, the villains and the victims in every epic. Why not? The world belongs to us ... Certainly the threat of human extinction, in The Council of Animals, also serves as a metaphor for the disappearance of others — hence the symbolic role reversal. But if all signs point everywhere, why bother to post those signs at all?
Sayaka Murata, tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori
Rave The New York Times Book Review The novel’s tone hovers between deadpan and naïveté: Even in its episodes of violence it has an affectless quality, which we presume is a function of Natsuki’s PTSD from the sexual assault (plus her E.T. origins, of course). Its appeal lies precisely in this tonal flatness — the anthropological distance the narrator maintains from her subjects. Reminiscent of certain excellent folk tales, expressionless prose is Murata’s trademark. If her description of \'the Factory\' strikes a superficial note, we can ascribe its stripped-down literality to Natsuki’s automaton identity. Extraterrestrials, it seems, are less like living beings than rudimentary robots with limited powers of affective analysis ... no need, in Murata’s stories, for a tedious interpretive struggle ... Their project of de-acculturating themselves is rendered matter-of-factly, without suspense, since — existing in a half-life of childish patter and reductive reasoning — they didn’t exhibit much tension of personality or emotional intelligence in the first place. But the proposition that we can deconstruct our socialization through an act of will is intriguing and important. Here it comes with a dose of pathos, since these characters don’t possess the conceptual tools to explore with depth or nuance the human nature they’re so focused on rejecting. Their beef with society is the reproductive pressure it exerts; other systemic oppressions that might give a thoughtful alien pause, like widespread inequality and injustice, are of no interest ... If the Marquis de Sade were reanimated as a polite Japanese millennial — less French, less political, less relentlessly graphic and less obsessed with feces — he might produce a document like Earthlings ... Murata’s presentation of alienation as a natural response to the pressures of conformity may not give us much that wasn’t on offer in, say, European existentialist writing of nearly a century ago. The strength of her voice lies in the faux-naïf lens through which she filters her dark view of humankind: We earthlings are sad, truncated bots, shuffling through the world in a dream of confusion.
Scarlett Thomas
Rave The New York Times Book Review Thomas’s humor has a sharp, rhythmic perfection. Her prose is fast-thinking, entertaining and punchy, her dialogue fully authentic without sinking into the tedium of real-life conversation ... Oligarchy is a study in obsessiveness pinned to a vague, whodunit structure we don’t really need, with a couple of barely felt deaths thrown in. But in Thomas’s hands we don’t care ... Intriguing, fluid and frequently funny interior monologues are what Thomas does best.
Sam Lipsyte
Rave The New York Times Book Review Sam Lipsyte’s third novel, The Ask, is a dark and jaded beast—the sort of book that, if it were an animal, would be a lumbering, hairy, crypto­zoological ape-man with a near-crippling case of elephantiasis. That’s not to say The Ask isn’t well hewn, funny or sophisticated, because in fact it’s all three ... Lipsyte is not only a smooth sentence-maker, he’s also a gifted critic of power ... there’s a rotten joy in Milo’s shenanigans despite his personal joylessness, a kind of delicious pleasure, with only a hint of rancidness, that accretes to us in his miserable ­wallowing ... What makes The Ask work so well is the way it dovetails its characters’ self-loathing with their self-consciousness. For instead of making its characters blind...it gives them 20-20 vision but endows them with perfect impotence ... And that’s why this book is a success: not only the belly laughs but also the sadness attendant upon the cultural failure it describes. There’s a genuine disappointment visible through the cynic’s jibes—the grief that comes with the end of empire and the collapse of an ideal.
Jeff VanderMeer
Rave The Los Angeles Times Annihilation, in which the educated and analytical similarly meets up with the inhuman, is a clear triumph for VanderMeer, who after numerous works of genre fiction has suddenly transcended genre with a compelling, elegant and existential story of far broader appeal … The apparent tragedy and freakish ecology of Area X's blight are quite fascinating, and the solitary voice of its post-humanist narrator is both deeply flawed and deeply trustworthy — a difficult and excellent balance in a novel whose world is built seamlessly and whose symbols are rich and dark.