PositiveThe Chicago Review of BooksLevy has slipped into more comfortable clothing and unpinned her curls: the writing is looser, her tone wryer, the incidents more anecdotal than transformative. Though a lighter read, Levy’s signature vibrant take on Freudian interpretation remains, as she imbues the objects of every day with nearly totemic significance, and dissects \'the private magic we invent to keep us out of harm’s way\' ... a careful balancing act of withholding and revelation. Levy uses the other characters she encounters as a way to refract her own point of view.
Antonio Muñoz Molina tr. Guillermo Bleichmar
RaveThe Chicago Review of BooksWhat appears at first as cacophony transforms into, in the words of one of the characters, \'an implicit and spontaneous order of the kind that occurs in nature.\' In this sense, the translation from Spanish by Guillermo Bleichmar should be celebrated for being consistent, transparent, nearly imperceptible as a translation, meaning that there’s no sense of interference or clumsy misplacement by another hand. The narrative voice comes through as European, sophisticated, in an English that is neither distinctively American nor British, and also entirely fluid. This is especially impressive in the passages riffing on advertising, which are hard to imagine as originating in another language, considering there’s an entire industry dedicated to \'localization\' of ad copy to local markets ... The effect is one of bracing poetry. By this I’m not referring to the common misperception of poetry as a sentimental form or to \'lyrical language,\' but rather the facility poetry has of turning a trite phrase inside out and making it glow with new meaning ... While the sheer mass of text and its sometimes repetitive episodes requires readerly fortitude, the novel’s sprawling excess, its playful unwillingness to be any one thing, are its greatest strength and the source of its splendor. I wouldn’t call the sensibility exuberant, but rather curious, open, if with a tinge of world-weariness ... The investigation is in the realm not of the literary scholar but of the alchemist who seeks to know what combination of streets, boots, and perambulations influence the creative process, and by implication, what forces transform a reader into a writer.
Magda Carneci, Trans. by Simona Sora
RaveChicago Review of BooksThis is a poet’s novel for readers seeking to be transported by language and image rather than story and character ... While its exploration of the experience of the female body is groundbreaking, to me the aim seems more spiritual than political, going beyond gender questions to ask the bigger ones, like: what is the meaning of life? ... Perhaps it is because the catalyst is often sexual that the work is considered feminist. Carneci’s writing (seamlessly translated by Sean Cotter) is fluid; it steadily accumulates force across paragraphs, and always with a rich and varied lexicon. The most extraordinary and strangest passages appear in her writing about sex ... This wonderfully strange, hermetic, and lucid novel offers a respite from the toxic cocktail and will perhaps inspire attunement to mysterious, internal images.
Gretel Ehrlich
RaveChicago Review of BooksThe book follows some of that excitement, from exploring never-before-tread Arctic fjords, to observing regenerative agriculture projects in the bush of Mugabe’s troubled Zimbabwe. Ehrlich is drawn again and again to places of extreme weather, extreme natural beauty ... This is not an intimate psychological memoir; accounts of transformational events like divorce and falling in love are terse. Ehrlich prefers to give voice to the extraordinary people she meets ... The writing is elegant and direct, and the aim is true ... the reach for the spiritual dimension of human relationships to animals and nature is never empty philosophizing ... At the same time, her descriptions of the natural world are exacting ... Each chapter is self-contained and plunges into a different world. There’s a sense that Ehrlich’s adventures could fill volumes (and indeed, some are explored in depth in her earlier books), but the undertone is not the excitement of discovery but the melancholy of loss ... Despite the singularity of Ehrlich’s life and experience, it becomes a story that encompasses every reader as well, a sorrow we all must contend with ... Ehrlich doesn’t offer easy solutions or optimism, but neither does she sink into despair. The response she offers is complex, requiring uniquely human capacities.
Jennifer Risher
MixedChicago Review of Books...Through frank revelations about money and \'how it makes us feel,\' Risher hopes to \'break down divides.\' ... As timely as these questions [about changing the status quo around wealth] may be, regrettably, they are not discussed in this book ... Considering the memoir on its own terms, Risher’s sincere aim is to show that the super-wealthy aren’t that different from the rest of us, and that wealth can’t eliminate all of an individual’s \'worries, insecurities, and limitations.\' ... Considering the book within the current political, economic and environmental context—which, given the pivotal nature of the present moment to the future of our species, seems appropriate, particularly if Risher’s stated aim is catalyze uncomfortable conversations about wealth—it’s worth asking what she brings to the debates convulsing every corner of the world.
Sanam Maher
RaveThe Chicago Review of Books... deeply researched and vividly written .. Rather than piece together a straightforward biography, Maher amplifies and explicates the tensions that characterized the life and death of the internet celebrity through portraits, interviews, and media criticism ... The wide-lens view of Pakistani society is fascinating, and Maher deftly fills in the necessary context for Western readers ... The book bursts with telling images ... Despite the polemical issues evoked by Qandeel Baloch’s story, Maher resists editorializing. While a point of view is obvious from the way the book contextualizes the murder within an exhaustive analysis of cyber harassment legislation in Pakistan and statistics on honor killings, Maher lets key figures in the story emerge in their own words ... More academically minded readers may object to the fact that Qandeel Baloch’s own words are sprinkled throughout the book (in italics) without place or date attribution, and that the timeline of events in her life are sometimes muddied by jumps in time ... some readers may be left wanting more detailed explanations of how Maher arrived at her seemingly authoritative account of events. Given the thoroughness of Maher’s investigation and her care in distinguishing fact from spin, I was happy to suspend doubts raised by these editorial decisions and give myself over to the gripping account ... Maher humanizes Baloch by allowing her most intimate self to remain opaque; she relies only on the facts of the young woman’s life and the words she left recorded.
Miranda Popkey
PositiveThe Chicago Review of BooksPopkey is careful to ground all of the talk and rumination in time and space ... Popkey has an eye for gesture, and a carefully documented choreography of pauses and gestures interrupts and enlivens the conversations and monologues ... While a novel filled with the stories women will only tell in an intimate moment could bring to mind feminist consciousness-raising or its 21st-century descendant, the personal essay, with its bloggy, conversational voice, this narrator does not aim to draw other women near. Instead she repels any sympathy that might be born of her confessions; the tone recalls the iciest moments of an Ottessa Moshfegh character ... For all of the disclosures, one is left with the feeling that she has more to tell, or that perhaps the evolving language of gender and power dynamics has not yet furnished the right language for her particular story yet.
