About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Francesco Pacifico, Tr. Elizabeth Harris
Positive The New York Times Book Review The last section, \'My Mother,\' is written in exquisitely spare, tender prose. (Elizabeth Harris, here especially, translates with a light, graceful touch.) ... If the male writer’s goal is to neither render judgment on his female characters nor reduce them to stereotype, \'is there anything left?\' It’s a telling question for both subject and author, the former trying to do the women he loves justice, the latter attempting, for perhaps the first time, to work in a sincere, rather than satirical, mode. Pacifico finds his answer in a kind of wistful reportage, striving not to interpret these women but simply to portray them ... Pacifico seems to have passed out of purgatory and into a less damning realm, one in which human flaws are to be exposed but also pitied, not mocked.
Bess Kalb
Positive The New York Times Book Review If the second half of Kalb’s narrative is less affecting than the first, perhaps that is simply because everything after escape from a probable pogrom must be ... The author’s hints at her grandmother’s failings make Bobby more character and less caricature, but one longs for a still more fully rounded portrait. Some moments of neglect and even cruelty sit uneasily alongside Bobby’s quips and potted family histories.
Helen DeWitt
Rave The Paris Review The Last Samurai is not a novel for everyone—no novel is—but it is a novel for many people. It is deliberately—proudly—erudite and intertextual; it is, like the mind of its author, stubbornly idiosyncratic. But also, importantly: it is a novel less interested in being ambitious for ambition’s sake, than it is in cultivating ambition in its readers ... If DeWitt could not set aside the limitations of her time, The Last Samurai certainly struggles against them. Narrative trains of thought are interrupted, mid-sentence, and then picked back up, pages later ... We are all too dumb, I suspect, for Helen DeWitt, if only because we are too lazy to be the one out of the hundred who refuses to spare herself the trouble of rational thought.
Iris Murdoch (Edited by Avril Horner & Anne Rowe)
Positive The New Republic If Murdoch’s letters shock, it is because her behavior is perhaps exaggerated, but not unrecognizable. We can laugh at self-deceivers in her novels for the same reason: not because we are so constant, but because they flit from passion to passion merely more frequently than we do.