About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Keiran Goddard
Positive The Los Angeles Times The template is a classic: Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy loses girl. But the delivery — a series of intimate, offbeat, often hilarious musings on a relationship, from first blush to post-breakup drinks — is a highly entertaining surprise. At first glance, the text looks like prose poetry: well-spaced, economical paragraphs of two or three lines. But the format belies the potency of the writing. This is not an airy ode; the hard truths of love and loss are boiled down here. If the novel were a sauce, it would be a reduction ... Hourglass suffers for its sometimes mawkish language, places where Goddard reaches for earnestness but sounds insincere, or just immature ... Still, the charms of Hourglass, like those of the narrator himself, are insidious. This is a sad book that is somehow wickedly fun to read.
Per Petterson, Tr. Ingvild Burkey
Positive Los Angeles Times ... the author seems particularly interested in the uses to which suffering can be put, the ways it can be marshaled for personal gain as well as the corrosive effect it can have on relationships ... Arvid’s tortured dealings can be annoying. His cluelessness and self-pity wear on the reader. His take on the experiences of adult women is often cliched ... Still, Petterson’s depiction of post-marriage disorientation rings painfully true ... The emotional claustrophobia in these sections is reminiscent of Elena Ferrante’s ferocious Days of Abandonment ... For all its run-on sentences and muddled emotions, Men in My Situation is possessed of an austerity and bleakness that is satisfyingly unforgiving (and that is tempting for an American reviewer to attach to cold, northern weather conditions—but I shall resist). The hapless, deeply flawed Arvid can make no sense of the string of senseless events that make a life. And his puzzlement offers comfort, transcending middle-aged male disaffection to speak to the universal condition of adulthood.
Julie Otsuka
Mixed Los Angeles Times \" The cultish devotion among Otsuka’s swimmers sometimes strains credulity ... We get it: Pool people are all in. Hard core. But Otsuka...is up to more than mere amusement. A master of shifting perspective, she is preparing us for a rift. Just as the reader settles into this amusing, intimate study of a microcosm, a crack appears on the wall of the pool and the book makes a flip turn ... Otsuka treats the omen with humor, infusing the narrative with the absurdist quality of a small-town mystery ... Otsuka’s play with perspective can be slightly confusing. Sometimes it’s omniscient, sometimes more specific (maybe Alice’s daughter)? Ultimately it doesn’t make consistent sense ... Her packed paragraphs are often-thrilling compilations of detail, even when she’s just listing items lost at the bottom of a pool (cotton balls, wedding rings, German marks). The novel is filled with these tender assemblages, a declarative chorus of human tastes, memories and woes ... For all of its expansive details, The Swimmers is sometimes twee in its first half. Even as it deals with \'aboveground\' troubles like dementia, the world of the book—speaking of lives suspended in water—feels a bit like a snow globe. Its often-captivating insularity can also be cloying at times. As in her earlier work, the heavier the themes, the more Otsuka’s language lifts off. Once we are squarely in Alice’s world, The Swimmers sparkles.\
Claire-Louise Bennett
Rave The Los Angeles Times Books about books tend toward the sappy. They often make the reductive, moralizing case that reading is a form of salvation, a surefire route to empathy. It is a unique pleasure to read a novel of bibliophilia that eschews this mode entirely ... wildly imaginative, unabashedly odd and mordantly funny ... I prepared to be irked by this swerve into the ultra-weird. But even in its surreality, this foray, like many in the novel, achieves a startling verisimilitude, as Bennett shares not just the story of Superbus but how she arrived at it. \'This is how it feels inside my mind,\' I ended up thinking ... It’s not easy to read a book like this, to surf the choppy waters of sometimes disparate associations accumulated over a lifetime, to return to the same pieces of a story (the Russian, for example, reappears) but never arrive at any resolution in the usual sense of the word ... But this is not a novel that purports to offer anything like the usual satisfactions. Each thought opens onto a reference or set of associations drawn from another work. The reader is simply along for the ride ... Fortunately, Bennett is very funny ... For the true-blue reader, this book-full-of-books is a gift and proof of a rare talent. It’s not meant to be plucked from the nightstand and chipped away at over the course of weeks, but a volume to be consumed whole, on one long, strange trip .. To Bennett’s great credit, Checkout 19 doesn’t dramatize the life-saving role of books. Reading here is not embraced as mere escape, nor glorified as edification. Bennett is not selling anything or arguing a point. In the telling of a life lived through books, and in her own sometimes floridly erudite sentences, the deep magic of writing is revealed.
Megan Nolan
Rave The Los Angeles Times ... wrenching ... Nolan is likely to draw facile comparisons to her brilliant compatriot Sally Rooney, whose work also turns a spotlight on power dynamics in relationships, but that move won’t do justice to the darkness in this book ... the narrator, in her very early 20s, feels painfully young at times. Here and there, the reader finds herself thinking, Snap out of it! Ciaran isn’t even that great! Then remembers that the details, even the man, are not the point ... Our narrator is lost to a devotion that borders on the religious. Here, Nolan often slips into cliché, drawing analogies to redemption or purification through love ... But elsewhere Nolan’s writing gleams with dark precision. Her narrator’s piercing, almost perverse self-awareness makes the action both more sad and more urgent ... Nolan performs her feminist fluency and conveys all the while a sense of fatigue, an acknowledgement that this is both new and not new. There is a sameness to all our stories. The decision to hold in suspicion the very form she is enacting is what makes the book refreshing and complex. What Acts of Desperation illuminates best is the chasm, sadly still enormous, between feminist politics and personal predicaments of love, sex and romance ... The novel is a powerful counterweight to the notion that young women today are free to define themselves apart from men. Nolan shows that as long as we are grappling with ideas about women’s desirability that have been authored by men, women are in a sense realized by the male gaze.
Tove Ditlevsen, trans. by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman
Rave Los Angeles Review of Books Some books lodge themselves in your consciousness, threatening significance, before you’ve even read them. The sense that they might be of enormous personal value creates a combination of excitement and something like dread. Such was the case for me with Tove Ditlevsen’s Dependency ... it’s bitterly sad ... She refuses the kind of interiority and self-flagellation we demand of women’s addiction stories, and so is read as pure horror, as monstrous ... I, too, wondered how Ditlevsen really felt about certain neglected relationships, especially with her children. But I also wanted to shake her hand for denying me a view on her shame, for challenging my belief that it was something to which I was entitled ... I see Dependency as a rare, early entry to the literature of addiction—as such, it is thrilling ... it is Ditlevsen herself who demands we foreground this part of her biography. In her own telling of her life, she reserved more than an entire third—141 of 370 pages—for her struggles with love and drugs. That was a radical act for a woman, anywhere on the globe, in 1971. I believe we ought to consider that math in our appraisal of her work.
Agnes Poirier
Positive The New Republic For those who love to dish about literary figures, Left Bank reads as an erudite and deeply satisfying gossip column, in which each story is more incredible than the last ... Poirier’s writing is both elegant and efficient ... Left Bank is deeply researched, but Poirier’s narrative suffers for its failure to reckon meaningfully with the extent of the war’s horrors, particularly industrialized murder on an unprecedented scale. Poirier occasionally writes with a disconcerting levity, referring to atrocities of the time in grand—and indirect—terms as the \'caprices of history\' ... In chronicling the Left Bank, Poirier is more interested in the romance of wartime paradoxes, the tensions of collaboration and resistance, freedom and subjugation, glamour and terror ... Poirier succeeds in constructing a sense of how Paris may have felt during those years.
Sigrid Rausing
Rave The Millions Rausing has clearly written Mayhem to wrest this gruesome story back from the British tabloid media, who have already mercilessly picked it apart. But she does far more. In this slim, stoic memoir—epigrammatic and laced with literary and scholarly references—Rausing thoughtfully, painstakingly, works a deep groove into the stubborn surface of certain bedeviling questions ... In many ways, Rausing’s haunting memoir is doing the only thing we can in the face of such a threat: gather our memories like specimens in a lab and work with them in various combinations, trying to stave off the disease, trying to figure something out.
Alissa Nutting
Positive The Rumpus \"...[a] hilarious, madcap novel ... Hazel’s confrontation with her father’s geriatric—but enthusiastic—sexuality is the novel’s great gift. Encounters with parental desire are notoriously, timelessly cringeworthy, but some of us are fated to have more of them than others ... Nutting deftly illustrates the uncanny creep of the technological into the realm of affect, but what’s truly creepy is how ordinary it all comes to seem ... Touchingly, the verisimilitude of these scenes involving her father and Diane lies in the complexity of Hazel’s own feelings. In navigating her manifold, often simultaneous emotional responses—disgust, disapproval, curiosity, pride, annoyance—Nutting lays bare the strange intensity and intimacy of the familial bond ... Like in those triumphant, early escape-from-domesticity novels, Byron is a straightforward scoundrel, and Hazel’s freedom becomes the unassailable good the reader is cheering for, which can get a bit tiresome ... Nutting’s smart, ribald, and hugely entertaining new novel provokes many chuckles. Occasionally, she reaches higher, and grants the reader flashes of something truly great: a striking view of the pathetic, that Gogolian, absurdist sublime.\
Catherine Lacey
Rave The New Republic It’s a quiet, calm, somewhat circuitous rumination on what we miss and miss out on when our connections to other human beings are synthetic. And it serves as a reminder that sometimes the fiction that feels most relevant to a hallucinatory political moment is not itself overtly political ... women in The Answers seem to exist to be done to. They possess a keen awareness, some street smarts, even cynicism. And yet, wherever they go, things happen to them, to their bodies. Objects find their way into women’s personal space ... A thoughtful, complex, feminist book that artfully mines the fun-house insanity of 21st century American womanhood by a uniquely talented writer who knows not to put forth any answers, only more questions.
Affinity Konar
Positive Full Stop Mischling is a novel that walks rather bravely into this fraught territory — both the history of the Holocaust and that of its representation. And it is, above all, an act of empathy ... Paradoxically, Mischling’s reliance on a familiarly shabby, twinkly-eyed Eastern Europeanness, is both its strength and its weakness. It’s weak because it’s vague, a cliché. And yet this sentimentality lends the novel some welcome knowability ... What really saves Mischling is Konar’s astonishing lyricism ... Though it may be overly reliant on well-worn tropes Mischling is a very powerful novel. Gripping and grim in equal measure, and beautifully, sometimes exquisitely, written.