Positive4ColumnsThe result is a text more faithful to Kafka’s handwriting but also more difficult to read. This is due not to Benjamin’s prose, which is consistently elegant and precise, but to the nature of the edition ... Benjamin presents the notebooks as they were written, with the repetitions, opacities, and grammatical errors that are characteristic of the drafts of even the most skilled of writers ... I have not the slightest doubt that this is the edition that should be used in classes where Kafka is taught, and its excellent apparatus of notes will illuminate references that otherwise would be completely illegible. As for the reader looking for pleasure, the decision seems to me a harder one ... When the desire to read this or that passage of Kafka’s notebooks arises, I will resort to Benjamin’s translation—but I’m glad that my first introduction to them as an adolescent was through Max Brod.
César Aira, Trans. by Katherine Silver
Positive4Columns... while the volume may be slim, it is a surprisingly rich work. For those who have not read [Aira], it is also an excellent place to start a relationship ... all the decisive elements of his work are here: the proliferation of events that link the numinous with the most banal domesticity, the cosmic with the inhabitants of a middle-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires; the more or less esoteric references to contemporary art and the philosophical tradition caught in the web of a writing that is deceptively plain; the book as a loose gathering of disparate narratives that adopt the pose of casual improvisations, textual toys fabricated to keep boredom at bay and wonderment close at hand.
Clarice Lispector, Trans. by Benjamin Moser & Magdalena Edwards
Positive4Columns\"The Chandelier is an extraordinary book ... imperfect, uneven, and immensely difficult as The Chandelier may be, it contains pages and paragraphs of greater literary substance than you will find in entire libraries of other writers ... The Chandelier already contains the germs of the best Lispector, but its brilliance is frequently muddled by the unstable, indecisive compromise she tries to broker with the narrative tradition (as exemplified by the gothic novel and the bildungsroman) that she obviously loved but that was never the best vehicle for her writing.\
