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Recent Reviews
Clarice Lispector, Trans. by Johnny Lorenz
Rave The Paris Review The final pages are what sets The Besieged City apart from Lispector’s other works: it has a happy ending of deus-ex-machina scale. Yet much of the novel is deeply inscrutable. Told by a removed and roving narrator in fleeting, epigrammatic vignettes, it can be difficult to inhabit Lucrécia’s emotions or motivations as she navigates the repressive world of early-twentieth-century romance ... Lispector’s characteristic experimental, associative stream-of-consciousness style can make even the simplest interactions feel alienating, disjointed, and baffling. Even the act of Lucrécia picking lint off a man’s sleeve becomes strained and peculiar. Such experimentations and departures do not lessen the novel’s greatness, just as they didn’t for James Joyce, or for Lispector’s frequent critical parallel, Virginia Woolf ... The Besieged City’s challenging prose certainly contributed to its long-delayed appearance in English. Yet underneath Lispector’s inventive, modernist style is a poignant and radical depiction of a young woman navigating a patriarchal society ... The Besieged City arrives to us today as an artifact and a time capsule, a bittersweet revelation of a missed moment in a modernist movement that has long since passed.
Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Trans. by Anne McClean
Positive Los Angeles Review of Books \"Vásquez the author dives deeply into a nuanced, fictionalized history of Colombia. At times, this plunge pushes the story to the point of tedium and redundancy. The heart of the novel may be Vásquez’s grappling with the legacy of these dual conspiracy theories, but it often takes a backseat to meanderings ... Why write a novel about conspiracy theories only to assert that nothing the reader has read can be considered reliable? Perhaps Vásquez is underlining the impossibility of a certain, objective truth.\
Clarice Lispector, Trans. by Benjamin Moser & Magdalena Edwards
Rave Electric Literature \"...the energy and spiritual wonder of her descriptions make the cryptic writing all the more resonant and spiritually urgent for both her character and her reader ... In reading The Chandelier, one finds an odd, mystical sort of clairvoyance in its pages?—?after pages and pages of a spiraling, circuitous, and rambling thoughts, the narrative will come up for air with a remarkable suddenness. A line, a passage will rise to the surface and ring brutally true or poignantly absurd.\
Jesmyn Ward
Mixed The Los Angeles Review of Books Ward has a keen sense for the overwhelming adversity facing many of the people living in the oft-forgotten stretches of Mississippi, and portrays a harrowing panorama of the rural South ... Throughout the story, Ward’s characters find themselves trying to untangle the fraught history of black lives on the American continent. The legacy of slavery and its reverberations is at once presently palpable and yet distant, both shaping every moment of the lives of Pop, Leonie, and Jojo, while also feeling amorphous and diffuse, a general, lingering dread that becomes hard to quantify ... Ward’s ghosts and their chorus of song are compelling, but at times feel overstretched, trying to bind up the host of calamitous problems facing Leonie, Jojo, and their family ... While Ward’s handling of complex social and cultural tremors is deftly done, the narrative itself can often feel unbalanced among its shifting voices.
Yaa Gyasi
Positive The Los Angeles Review of Books Gyasi’s novel gives voice to some of the voiceless multitudes ... The strength of Gyasi’s novel lies in the complexity and the profundity of these moments of reflection, which gain momentum in each iteration, with each new generation. The things lost and gained by each successive generation evolve into the richness and the deep deficits of the characters ... Though linked by the bonds of family and legacy, the disconnected nature of vignettes leaves large gaps and swaths of these characters’ lives unchronicled.
Yann Martel
Positive The New York Times Book Review ...although his writing hums with a vivid populism, his emotional and allegorical tale seems at times almost too safely well done to do justice to the ragged and tortured people whose tragedies it traces.