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Recent Reviews
Drew Gilpin Faust
Positive Washington Independent Review of Books Both an engaging memoir and an essential social history ... One of the great contributions that Necessary Trouble makes to history is that it is both a personal accounting and an analysis of how one movement morphed into another ... While her reflections on the various dimensions of freedom are interesting, this reviewer would have welcomed a more personal, contemplative conclusion to the memoir that examined what she felt being back in Virginia.
Yiyun Li
Mixed Washington Independent Review of Books The author isn’t as interested in fully developed characters as she is in the ontological questions her two young heroines explore through the \'games\' they create for themselves ... The Book of Goose is not as intriguing as a narrative as it is as a vehicle for fundamental inquiries.
Victoria Shorr
Rave The Washington Independent Review of Books ... not the proverbial but elusive Great American Novel. Rather, it is two great American novellas and two very different, unique perspectives from which to consider the tug of America’s past and the pull of its opportunities. Alone, either of these affecting stories would have been an engrossing read; together, they offer a motherlode of questions and issues, not to mention wonderful fodder for book groups ... Shorr is a wonderful stylist whose propulsive prose reflects the nature of memory itself, alighting here, then there, then back here. Moreover, given that \'Great Uncle Edward\' is about a decidedly WASPY family, Shorr sidesteps the temptation to slip into irony and instead treats her subjects with kindness ... achieves what all fine fiction must: With nary a hint of being doctrinaire, its characters’ lives unfold in the midst of history’s ebb and flow.
Geraldine Brooks
Mixed The Washington Independent Review of Books Scott’s narrative is the only one told in the first person — through his diaries — and Brooks does a wonderful job capturing the artist’s obsequious tone and cool detachment toward the moneyed gentry who pay him ... Scott’s paintings form the basis for the chapters covering the 1950s and 2019, but Brooks, who so beautifully captures the nuanced and constant sense of threat permeating the Old South, fails to achieve similar tension with her contemporary characters ... Yet despite mixed messages and microaggressions, Jess and Theo begin a fitful relationship that might border on cliché if not for the fact that Brooks’ subject isn’t love. It’s race in America. And her gripping, tragic conclusion to Horse exemplifies the truth of Faulkner’s memorable assertion: \'The past is never dead. It’s not even past.\'
Halldor Laxness, trans. by Philip Roughton
Rave The Washington Independent Review of Books Readers who’ve never heard of this fierce, crude, uncompromising, independent, isolated, enterprising, vulnerable daughter of Iceland’s frigid sea and narrow fjords will meet a character who would be as at home at today’s #MeToo rallies as she was nearly a century ago in the tiny village of Óseyr ... Steeped in Iceland’s foundational epics, Laxness uses his villagers like a Greek chorus — not quite individuated but critically important. While their lives are unspeakably hard, their hearts thrum with Iceland’s proud heritage ... In other places, Laxness wields his chorus as an object of humor, and in yet others as unsympathetic, gossipy observers of Salka’s struggle to survive after Sigurlína dies and Steinƥór and Arnaldur compete for her heart ... Doubtless, modern-day feminists will see in Salka an admirable example of female fortitude and resolve. And certainly, she is that. But she’s also much more. She is the ultimate realist, and she applies her clear-eyed vision with equal intensity to the price of fish as to the price love will exact on her heart.
Deborah Levy
Positive The Washington Independent Review of Books ... open-hearted ... Levy’s chapter on cleaning out her stepmother’s apartment is a particularly good example of the recursive structure and ruminative speculation that undergird all good personal genres. But in other places, her linkages between disparate objects seem forced or underdeveloped. In Greece, for example, she stays on Hydra, the island where Leonard Cohen loved and left his treasured Marianne. But Levy’s own catalog of goodbyes, told through the lens of Cohen’s, doesn’t reach the level of poignancy either deserves ... On the other hand, she adroitly interweaves the tension between an artist’s — especially a female artist’s — need for solitude and need for family and friends ... holds neither a hint of rancor nor victimhood. Instead, with wit and insight, she takes us where few new books go: into the lively, varied, happy world of an intelligent older woman.
Deborah Levy
Positive Washington Independent Review of Books \"Levy’s chapter on cleaning out her stepmother’s apartment is a particularly good example of the recursive structure and ruminative speculation that undergird all good personal genres. But in other places, her linkages between disparate objects seem forced or underdeveloped. In Greece, for example, she stays on Hydra, the island where Leonard Cohen loved and left his treasured Marianne. But Levy’s own catalog of goodbyes, told through the lens of Cohen’s, doesn’t reach the level of poignancy either deserves. On the other hand, she adroitly interweaves the tension between an artist’s—especially a female artist’s—need for solitude and need for family and friends. Not to mention the attendant obligations thereof. To Levy’s credit, Real Estate, the final installment of her triparted autobiography, holds neither a hint of rancor nor victimhood. Instead, with wit and insight, she takes us where few new books go: into the lively, varied, happy world of an intelligent older woman. \
Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken
Rave The Washington Independent Review of Books ... may prove to be less salacious but no less provocative. Or, at least, no less thought-provoking ... Neither confessional in the vein of David Sedaris nor meditative in the style of the Atlantic’s James Parker, these essays suggest the philosophical mode of Emerson, that of an observant, detached, analytic, earnest, and fearless interlocutor whose intellect ranges over a landscape as vast as the Scandinavian night sky ... The first 17 essays in In the Land of the Cyclops are philosophically illuminating, but somewhat didactic and stylistically ponderous. The same ideas appear several times, and Knausgaard’s digressions, while interesting, can be distracting. But then we come to the final offering, Ten Years Old, the one giving form to all the principles found in the rest ... his artistic genius makes us feel something has transpired. And it is monumental.
Deborah Levy
Rave The Washington Independent Review of Books ... stunning ... Deborah Levy achieves what other authors have attempted but few have realized ... What Levy has created is the fictional equivalent to the principle of theoretical physics that holds a particle can exist in two places at once ... may not be for everyone, especially those for whom the joys of linear narratives provide transportive escape from life’s cares. But for those who dare to step off the curb into the unfamiliar, Levy’s novel offers a panopticon of new realities.
Yangsze Choo
Rave Washington Independent Review of Books The Night Tiger is a galloping good read that’s blessedly free of political polemics and post-colonial self-righteousness. Instead, what author Yangsze Choo has given readers is a darn good yarn ... To her credit, Choo manages to intertwine...plots and subplots with themes of superstition, Confucianism, and the desire for personal fulfillment versus the tug of familial loyalty. Altogether, a bravura performance ... Choo’s skill in creating a dynamic, vibrant, non-Western cosmos rivals that of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Half of a Yellow Sun ... Ren’s porous sense of reality (and Choo’s smart use of the present tense) gives his passages a propulsive vitality that grips the reader’s attention. Ren doesn’t know what is going to happen next, and neither does the reader. Conversely, Ji Lin relates her story in the past tense, but neither she nor the reader benefits from hindsight. But perhaps this is just as well. Any probing self-analysis might have resulted in a more plodding novel, one that wouldn’t have been half as entertaining. As it is, readers may not be moved by The Night Tiger. But they certainly will be grabbed.
Melissa Febos
Positive The Washington Independent Review \"Febos invites readers to examine the contents of her life. Alcoholism, drug addiction, desire, dependency, she fearlessly lays them out before us and probes them with the analytic eye of a diagnostician. And nothing does she dissect more painstakingly nor with more honesty than love ... This technique of braiding together disparate stories with other material is one Febos employs throughout, but not always successfully...in places, her detours are distracting and the thread wending its way back to her principal narrative doesn’t hold ... That said, Abandon Me has much to recommend it: candor, a tone blessedly free of self-pity, and, for all those who ever flipped over the shiny side of love’s bright coin and discovered dross, hope.\