PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)Siblings is like a book from a lost civilisation. It comes with four pages of endnotes, which these days is unheard of in fiction ... Siblings is a generational book. Like Gen X-ers or Gen Z-ers, Reimann looked about her to see that the markers of life and society had been put in place by people alien to her ... They don’t seem to offer a ready place in a contemporary society for Elisabeth or Uli. There is a social-industrial complex being run up, but they’re not sure they fit ... On the one hand, the array of possible relationships is so great and potentially so variegated, from the neutral pool of comrade, colleague, workmate; on the other, all the men in Siblings seem to be the same man, and the woman seems to be equally drawn to all of them.
Colm Tóibín
PanThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)The Magician is pell-mell narration, recitative, Nacherzählung ... Tóibín has a dozen, or even a score, of people to push through sixty years...and he can’t afford to stop too many times. And so the poor words come out for them to speak. Like little soundbites, little what-might-have-been-said-by-you-or-me-in-similar-circumstances samples. Scenelets. Description intolerably bland ... In all this soap opera, tedious and poorly told and lacking insight and accuracy to them...breathless and arbitrary and inconsequential to others, it is hard even to see \'Thomas\', harder still to guess what he might represent to Tóibín ... The Magician isn’t just a bad book, or a misconceived book, or a book that should never have been written: it is in some sense a book that doesn’t exist. Crap hat, no rabbit.
Susan Bernofsky
PositiveThe New York Review of BooksWell, here it is, I’m happy to say, an accurate, independent, and well-researched English life of the pauper, walker, novelist, and most heterogeneous of authors...a life made by Bernofsky from Alps as much as archives—no sparing of shoe-leather here—and still without the prolixity that spoils so many biographies these days ... styles are important, and Bernofsky writes about them perceptively and with compassion. Truly, Walser is a handwriter who dreamed of succeeding as an original author but was often forced to return to copy work and clerking ... a book that seems to deepen and find itself as it goes along, her impressive last forty pages, The Quiet Years: 1929–1956, show her at her most resolutely delicate and forbearing ... we get a book that is (by design) not a scintillating or hard-edged character study. That is not so much the \'who\' as the \'how\' or mainly the \'how not\' of Robert Walser—the movement of this eccentric Brownian particle through zones of poverty, independence, mannerliness, provocation, and a sort of manic positivity.
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, tr. Philip Boehm
MixedThe New York Times Book Review... has been efficiently translated into English by Philip Boehm (who has done much harder things much better) ... Conditioning by the genre — and some historical knowledge of the 1930s — makes us impatient with Silbermann, who doesn’t have a plan, doesn’t keep a cool head, doesn’t discover in himself unexpected resources. It also perhaps makes us unable to cope with the world as is, where the law is broken with impunity, even to applause ... a gripping if occasionally annoying read. It is the work of a very young man, both urgent and perishable, and written at some remove from the events and atmospheres it describes. There is no iron logic defining its scenes or their sequence. We rarely think: \'Yes! This is it!\' Tension washes in and out. There is a naïve and rather uncomfortable gap between the third-person narrative and the interior protocol of Silbermann’s consciousness. It is perhaps too much to hope for a masterpiece from the circumstances of its retrieval ... It is also, strangely, not a vivid book. There is very little in the way of speaking detail ... doesn’t have the courage of its schema, either: It could have been an absurdist book, a poetic parable, in which the character has given up on himself, and is existentially negotiating his final days, preferring the train to stationary life, and preferring the restaurant car to the other carriages. One can only imagine what Orwell or Camus might have done with such a setup ... At its best, The Passenger works as an invitation to the reader to be his own Otto Silbermann. The book relies on its situation, its frantic times, which we can easily gain access to with our own imaginations, without Boschwitz’s frail guard rails. But it’s easier, of course, to grasp the full potential of history after the fact, than to do so while living its events, tossed by its waves.
Robert Musil, trans. by Joel Agee
RaveThe New York Review of BooksAgathe is 350 pages, a respectable length, and yet it feels—especially against the perspective of the nihil alienum, all-singing, all-dancing Man Without Qualities—almost like a novella ... Edenic prose as beautiful as any poetry ... Agathe, or, The Forgotten Sister absolutely works as a book—a fractal fractal, an unfinished novel lifted from within another unfinished novel. It seems to have been reasonably straightforward to isolate this strand of the narrative from the others ... one of those books where writer and translator keep company. It reads like a book Agee was born to translate. I wonder if I have ever read a better translation. The book shines with pleasure, the complex sentences opening in front of you, balanced and sequential and easy to follow in all their twists and curlicues. Here, two writers have truly found each other, the intelligent slither of polysyllables, sometimes amusing, sometimes drily determined to make some vanishingly small distinction of vast implications, suddenly giving way to a line or two of dialogue, a small action, and some note of haiku-like compression ... A superlative translation, it is equally good over long distances (making it less susceptible to quotation), and in bravura passages timed to perfection[.]
Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, Ed. by Saskia Hamilton
PositiveThe Times Literary SupplementHardwick...emerging belatedly as the heroine of her own, takes over The Dolphin Letters...It seems increasingly that since his death, Lowell has lost and lost and gone on losing. Yes, others have come up, but it is strange how quickly he seems to have gone backwards as well. He suffers here not merely because as the deserting husband he is the villain of the piece, but also because he is less in evidence; either he is absent (silent, often, or in arrears), or sheepishly asserting a presence that often seemed, even to him, misplaced and hard to credit ... Hardwick emerges as a superior person altogether, so much more diligent, more intense, more compassionate, more aware, more committed than anyone else around. This is the unsurprising revelation of the book. Her white pieces overwhelm his black. Sometimes, reading her, you think she is even better at being Lowell than he is, the more literary, the more acute, the more inspired, the better phrasemaker ... The Dolphin Letters reads not like soap opera or life (thank God), but maybe an epistolary novel among high-strung, intelligent, well-intentioned characters; it is an agreeable and surprising aspect of the book that it doesn’t show us people at their worst. Mercifully, we do not have the squalid feeling that we are reading something we shouldn’t be ... Through all these years Hardwick and Lowell somehow carried on talking to each other.
Bertolt Brecht
PanThe New York Review of BooksIf this collection of Bertolt Brecht’s poems in English were half its length, it would be great; if a third, spectacular; if a quarter, indispensable ... The gigantism perplexes me ... Do we really have such gargantuan appetites for (mostly small) poems? It seems to take an unduly long time in the new collection before one reaches familiar ground ... the first time I encountered a little run of poems I enjoyed and thought were worth reading (which is surely how a big book like this sinks or swims), it was after page 50 ... I have every expectation that when a 200- or 300-page selection is made from this collection—what the film people call \'exploiting the rights\' to it—it will be an important book, and something everyone should have.
Lauren Groff
MixedLondon Review of BooksFlorida feels like a clever and bold title to me ... [it] sells and oversells Groff\'s new publication ... an uneven collection ... The pieces (one doesn’t want to use the word stories here, or not always) are sometimes more fictionary (to use Tom Paulin’s word), sometimes less so; the wilder, more strenuous ones are usually the weaker, and end up merely irking the unflapped, flapped-at reader. Read here, in situ, it seems, in patches, an adorably local book. A selfie stick of a book ... Groff writes under pressure to make event, to make drama, to make fear. The reader feels this, continually, sympathises, and is puzzled ... Certainly, the book gives voice to the ambient fear that these days gets slathered over everything in America ... There are several references to ‘bad men’ in the book or ‘possibly terrible men’, but there aren’t any bad or possibly terrible men in it ... the supposed victims here are far more competent and alarming and capable of inflicting damage than any of the agencies of their looked-for doom.
Richard Flanagan
PanThe London Review BooksThis novel is truly an entitled thing: it demands both action and high-value misty contemplation or ‘memory’. It is a universal solvent, or claims to be. You want love, it says; I got love! You want death? I got it. All the kinds. Any amount. It is all bite, and no chew … In construction, the book is the half-hearted retrospective of a dying old man (the life flashing before the eyes – think of something like Hermann Broch’s Death of Virgil) that forsakes its tether for the more leisurely freedom of an impersonal series of chronological flashbacks; only to leave that in turn for an account of other characters in their own personal circumstances, in Australia, in Japan, in Korea, of which Dorrigo Evans can have known little or nothing at all. The final effect is of an unplanned collage, a rather sticky collage.
