About Book Marks
Martin Riker
Recent Reviews
Laurent Mauvignier, trans. by Daniel Levin Becker
Rave The New York Times Book Review If I start by calling Laurent Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party a psychological thriller, understand that this means what you probably think it means, but also something else. It means a nail-biter plot, but also a focus on characters’ interior worlds so detailed that at times I forgot there was a plot at all ... It is precisely because genres like westerns, mysteries or thrillers traditionally rely on high drama and plot twists that filling them up with small things...can be so evocative and strange ... Not an ironic thriller, but one that truly thrills ... Mauvignier writes wonderfully winding sentences — meticulously translated by Daniel Levin Becker — that zoom in on his characters’ thoughts and feelings in painstaking detail ... The novel maintains its depth, its scrutinizing slowness: a real-time study in crippling self-consciousness, the fragility of normalcy and the reality of violence.
Marlen Haushofer tr. Shaun Whiteside
Rave Wall Street Journal ... brilliant ... speculative fiction of a distinctly existential sort, where the subject being speculated on is not what happened to the world, but what happens to reality when society is stripped away ... her adventures are mundane but with very high stakes, and at key emotional moments her report gives way to poignant self-reflection ... Part of [Haushofer\'s] genius in The Wall is that she never allows the story to drift into symbolism or analogy, as I just did by comparing physical and psychological walls. The reader is at all times kept in the situation of the narrator, forced to make sense of the circumstances she has been given. Nothing resolves, yet the book is constantly resonating: a reference to nuclear war in the opening pages, for example, sets up an allegorical possibility that is never followed up on, but also never goes away. Nor do the narrator’s speculations about the wall yield clarifying answers. The wall is simply a fact, a new situation, and to the extent that the novel is either utopian or dystopian—it has been called both, in addition to all the other things it has been called—this is because its subject is neither the wall nor the world that created it, but the experiences of one very warmhearted, astute, resilient woman, whose solitary reality is so sane and convincing as to make our own world seem a little otherworldly.
Antonio Muñoz Molina tr. Guillermo Bleichmar
Mixed The New York Times Book Review There are many excellent passages, insightful biographical sketches about the lives of his favorite writers or tender reflections on his beloved wife. And Guillermo Bleichmar’s translation is consistently graceful. But there are too many paragraphs describing his pencils and his favorite cafe, too many environmental catastrophes listed off as if we don’t know about them. Too much simply pointing at realities all of us already see. Where Benjamin’s writing is energized by his erudition Baudelaire’s by passion and invention, and Pessoa’s by his immersive voice, Muñoz Molina’s narrator seems content to catalog, as if writing things down is enough to make them interesting ... It is an increasingly pressing project, as the refuse keeps piling up, but also increasing is the need for imagination in transforming the refuse into something that will move us.
Adalbert Stifter
Positive The Wall Street Journal A collection of six tales, most of them closer in length to novellas than short stories, first published in 1853 and newly translated by Isabel Fargo Cole ... The titles Stifter gave these pieces—each named for a different type of stone—refer to a childhood rock collection he describes in a preface. The point is to assure readers that this is but a humble gathering, each story a simple stone, charming upon close inspection. In reality, Stifter’s tales are not simple at all, but sweeping and complex ... It is through storytelling that drama enters Stifter’s tales. Stories are not just accounts of experience; they are a primary means by which we encounter the world ... Catastrophe is always there, waiting to disrupt the bucolic normalcy, a dark note of existential indifference and an admonition against forgetting ... Had this volume contained an additional six stories, Stifter’s writerly patterns might start to feel repetitive. But the variations here are fresh enough to operate more as themes than formulas, and the collective result is like a map to a particular literary sensibility, a worldview in which storytelling is at the center of humanity, but humanity is not the center of the world.
Jay Parini
Positive The Wall Street Journal These people and events are real, though the book they appear in, ostensibly a memoir, reads much more like a novel, filled with lively characters and satisfying story arcs, but with little of the roughness of real life ... a classic comic-philosophical road story, playfully conscious of its own traditions ... Many of the book’s loveliest passages are pure geography; as he drives, Jay describes to Borges the passing landscapes of Scotland, to which Borges adds literary and historical context. The pressure to capture Scotland in words for the great Jorge Luis Borges forces Jay to think about language in a new way, to \'up his game\' as a poet, and this artistic journey, occurring alongside their physical journey, becomes the book’s emotional backbone: Jay’s coming-of-age, caught between a distant war, a seemingly unrequited love, and the liberating spirit of literature ... Mr. Parini’s efforts to meld his autobiographical story with Borgesian themes comes off a bit forced—a sort of \'Greatest Hits of Borges\' track layered awkwardly over the palimpsest of his own lived experiences ... Borges’s fictions are like bottomless pits you fall into, where philosophical mysteries of identity and consciousness refuse to resolve themselves. Borges and Me holds no such mysteries, which is no doubt part of why its evocation of the spirit of Borges’s fiction falls flat. Jay is a subtly drawn protagonist, but by the end of his journey, his crisis of self has resolved neatly in a carpe diem-style climax, where a confrontation with death (of his friend in Vietnam) becomes a path to embracing life (going after the girl), all of it made possible through his liberating week with Borges. It is perhaps a reasonable ending for a \'novelistic memoir\' but lacks the open-ended complexity of a \'Borgesian ‘fiction’ \'; in that sense, readers looking for an \'encounter\' with Borges will be disappointed. What they will find instead is a fun, tightly crafted, tenderhearted literary adventure, an improbable tale that, like many improbable tales, happens to be true.
Lucy Ellmann
Rave The New York Times Book Review For most of its 1,000 pages, Lucy Ellmann’s brilliantly ambitious seventh novel follows the unspooling consciousness of an Ohio housewife circa 2017, and does so almost entirely in one long, lyrical, constantly surprising sentence ... her voice has a distinct cadence ... since she is a curious, politically conscious, slightly frenetic person, we step into and out of subjects from Donald Trump to purple martins, global warming to Laura Ingalls Wilder, animal cruelty, school shootings, SpaghettiOs, industrial pollution, hydrangeas, even the word \'hydrangea\' ... At times there’s such fury to these ruminations that the book seems to shift into direct cultural critique; at other times it all seems simply part of the story. The author’s hand never points us either way ... Whatever strangeness it presents has to do with the fact that, notwithstanding Ellmann’s great skills in narrative and character development, the overall effect is less plot-driven drama than vast existential collage. This is a novel, but it is also, fundamentally, a very long and meaningful list ... as accumulative, as pointed, as death-addled, as joyous, as storied, as multitudinous and as large as life.
Giacomo Sartori
Pan The New York Times Book Review \"The novel’s drama lies in Daphne’s tale, which God gradually tells: the story of her own messy existence, and the mess she is making of His. Unfortunately, Daphne’s story proves a little scattered, in part because she is kept at such a remove from the reader that she never emerges as a complex, coherent character, only as an object of God’s fascination. Humor is famously tough to translate, and perhaps I Am God is a more successful book in Italian than in this English version. The premise is certainly fun. The problem is that God, here, isn’t provocative or charismatic enough to pull off a one-man show ... If God in a novel cracks a joke, it can be silly or grim or anywhere in between, but it has to be funny.\
Fleur Jaeggy, trans. by Minna Zallman Proctor
Rave The New York Times Book Review These are haunting books, both with narrators struggling to retrieve a past that exists only in their memory and through notes and photographs ... they depict the mind in a holding pattern, circling around subjects that, being absent, can never be reached ... That same abyss is visited with a lighter heart and more graceful wit in These Possible Lives, a collection of three biographical essays, lyrically translated by Minna Zallman Proctor ... Brilliant, associative and short, Jaeggy’s essays have the beauty and economy of poems but the souls of portraits.
Clarice Lispector, Trans. by Benjamin Moser & Magdalena Edwards
Rave The New York Times Book Review The Chandelier fits a common pattern for second novels: It takes up the most remarkable attributes of its author’s first book and does all those same things, only more so. There is the Woolf-like fluidity of inner and outer worlds ... The writing is again relentless, exultant — what a later Lispector character called \'ecstasy without a peak\' — but here it comes in longer stretches and with fewer breaks ... As her thoughts grow increasingly untethered from the physical space of her story, they lose momentum. So much swirling begins to feel, paradoxically, like stasis: less like “flowing” and more like being stuck ... in The Chandelier, it tends to smother whatever else she is up to ... Lispector is up to some extraordinary things. There is her weird genius for description ... There is her uncanny dialogue, and the ease with which she elevates even the most mundane reality.
Fleur Jaeggy, Trans. by Gini Alhadeff
Rave The New York Times Book Review The first, I Am the Brother of XX, is a collection of stories, monologues and memoir, less cohesive than her previous books but with the same stark, surprising prose, here translated by Gini Alhadeff. These are grim tales, often violent ... Yet even in these softer, melancholic pieces, darkness seems never far away, and literally isn’t, since much of the book is filled with tales of death and madness ... It is also filled, to an uncanny degree, with actual portraits ... For Jaeggy, a painting or photograph is a doorway to the dead, and entering through it involves existential risk.