PositiveHyperallergicAnarchic in tone and structured like a Mobius strip, Search History is Lim’s fourth book to date, and the author’s best attempt yet to graft his discursive, esoteric ideas onto the rip-roaring action of genre fiction. There is a risk of flying too close to the sun; the wax that holds this story together is warm. This is especially apparent in the novel’s two prologues, which seem included less for the reader’s benefit than as some authorial throat-clearing. Here, the narrative is still molten ... One of the great jokes of the novel, and one I am certain Lim is in on, is the way that, on its surface, it seems to fail to cohere, composed of recognizable narrative forms that elbow disjointedly against one another. Just the sort of book an AI would write. The best compliment I can give Search History is that the great rewards of its reading come from the risks of its experimentalism; it is a success that sticks its landing quite close to failure ... And in his hands the MacGuffin, long since revealed as an insubstantial engine of plot, takes on a metaphysical heft.
Maria Stepanova tr. Sasha Dugdale
RaveThe Brooklyn RailGenerations of Stepanova’s family...made it through the Siege of Leningrad and the Russian Civil War ... Simply the breadth of time and the scope of variation in their lives through that period makes for some fascinating, unforgettable anecdotes of life during revolution and the Soviet era ... These stories are relayed to us as they were relayed to [Stepanova], vividly and mysteriously, with a few contradictions and the inevitable loose ends of someone who cannot afford dalliance in the past. If life is, as Stepanova quotes Nabokov, \'but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,\' then the concentration of this light is blinding, the force at which everything happens overwhelming—and the beginning and end of these flashes never discrete, as the interlocking generations prove so well.
Dorthe Nors, Trans. by Misha Hoekstra
RaveHyperallergicThe short stories of the contemporary Danish author Dorthe Nors are a masterclass in minimalism — and an opportunity to ponder what remains in texts so stripped bare. Never longer than a few pages, her works are sleek and compressed, and in them characters play hide and seek with fragments of their personhood, like shadowy figures in a darkened place, illuminated now and then by the flash of a lightning bolt ... The collection has the feeling of homecoming: Nors is at her strongest working within the clean lines of short paragraphs and simple sentences, minimalism as we know it best ... provides readers with greater access to interiority than anything by Carver, and to a wider variety of lives and experiences. But minimalism can be a fascinating way to parse an author’s priorities, or even speculate on the collective moods and identities that undergird them ... Like Carver’s, Nors’s style is, in a manner of speaking, dirty realism about her homeland ... Memories and perturbations strengthen a story that would otherwise be uneventful, simply the act of taking a few laps. But the threat of death, of drowning, of late-season hunters, animates the mundane in Nors’s fiction, even pushing it to the point of combustion at the moment the curtains fall.
