RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn Fuentes’s hands, the \"about\" of Countries of Origin — the cruelty of borders — is woven in seamlessly with the \"not about\" details that deepen and broaden Fuentes’s story ... Countries of Origin does what all memorable novels do: It leaves the reader’s world a little larger, airier and more forgiving than before.
Daniel Black
PositiveNew York Times Book ReviewBlack’s sad and gripping new novel is an example of how fiction is not just a form of literature but a place. We go there for lessons on how to live, how to change and, most important, how to forgive and seek forgiveness ... Don’t Cry for Me rides the rickety line between tragedy and melodrama. But despite its sentimental risks — it features an obsessive, cloying focus on family meals...for example, and repeats the assertion that simply telling the story or getting it off one’s chest will make a difference — a theme emerges: Don’t Cry for Me is a novel about novels, a story about stories.
Adrian Nathan West
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... a compact and stirring, if uneven, portrait of transgenerational hesitation. At its best, the novel showcases the recognizable confusion of a changing world. Actions no longer earn their predictable reactions ... West has an eye for detail...But not all of his descriptions land...In these more jarring moments, the novel tests its way forward, exhibiting an uncertainty that the bodybuilding plot, introduced halfway through the book, seems to reinforce.
Obed Silva
MixedThe New York Times Book Review... calls to mind a drunken man alone in a bar who wants to \'remember when\' with you about each of his scars. His tales are moving. They are also exhausting ... The violence Silva describes is disturbing; and though he seems to acknowledge the chauvinistic aspects of being raised in a family that believes violence is its inheritance, it’s still hard not to cringe at some of the casual misogyny in the book ... Silva seems to be trying to humanize someone who caused immense pain, to understand someone whose crimes, literal and moral, have hurt generations of his family. It’s a grand and necessary undertaking, particularly at such an ethically binary moment in history — when it has become too easy to erase or ignore the good parts of people because they have done terrible things as well. However, the memoir’s exuberance pushes it closer to legend than literature: that is, further out of reach.
Donald Antrim
RaveThe Boston GlobeThe book is superb, rich with all the details and vocabularies that comprise any de-mystification of illness.
Thomas Grattan
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... a wonderful, immersive debut ... Here is where the novel’s heft earns its great, beautiful weight. Beate decides to move back to Germany, returning with children of her own ... is, in so many ways, a novel of life — at least in James Salter’s sense: \'Life is weather. Life is meals.\' As in many great novels, time is perhaps its most magnetic character. Our lives are time spent, and it’s a deep, expansive pleasure to spend a little of ours as these characters spend their own ... Most extraordinarily, Grattan gives us not only life, but a good life, the rarity of which in fiction (and increasingly, reality) is a shame. Is happiness really so uninteresting? Is contentment? Both seem to have developed that reputation, but in Grattan’s hands, life’s joys are magnetic ... Even among the absolute, unequivocal horrors of Eastern Europe in the 1990s, there is room for life. Room, even, for beauty, which Grattan delivers with graceful economy ... Where our present era of decimated attention demands contraction and diminishment, The Recent East offers expansion; it artfully holds open a needed space — to wander, to contemplate, to notice. Even just to breathe. Like the house in the novel, life is so much larger than we remember ... Grattan’s true talent is patience. I think it’s only now that I’ve realized where it is these characters grow. One name for it is family. The other, no matter who offers it, is love. I’m grateful this novel could take me there.
Guillermo Saccomanno, Trans. by Andrea G. Labinger
RaveFull Stop... a great novel ... [A] necessity of tyranny is submission, and on this Saccomanno has built a brilliant fugue ... One of Saccomanno’s immense triumphs in this novel is to eradicate whatever imagined solidarity, whatever togetherness, readers are tempted to overlay onto Professor Gómez’s life in 1977. The story one wishes to hear is how people band together, how they hang onto their humanity. As the vanished bodies add up and Gómez grows more and more alone, it becomes clear that the genius of 77 is not that humanity endures such overwhelming and invasive terror, but that it doesn’t. It can’t ... I am—as we all should be—grateful for 77 and all novels like it[.]
Valeria Luiselli, Trans. by Christina MacSweeney
RaveFull StopRegardless of who I choose to be, Faces in the Crowd highlights the question itself more vividly, more urgently, than any novel I’ve read in recent years ... If this sounds complicated, it’s not. At all. Faces in the Crowd avoids all the hostile tricks common among imbricated, polyphonic novels. It’s immensely readable, and yet it resists the neat, newspaper headline description ... Faces in the Crowd is best read as a novel, not a paragraph or a tweet, and definitely not a review. It’s a unique, inward fiction whose dimensions multiply as its narrator nears the total ecstasy of writing itself.
