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Recent Reviews
Marion Gibson
Mixed The New Yorker \"The experiences of the accused women (and a few accused men) are foregrounded, through novelistic descriptions of their lives before and after their persecution ... If Gibson is perhaps at times fitting witches to her own vision, she is not alone in that ... Seeing witches through the Michelets’ lens is comforting, even moving, but it also feels not only incorrect but wrong. There are ways of valuing these accused witches without asserting that they were heroes and rebels who embodied our beliefs.\
Alexandra Horowitz
Positive The New Yorker There are quite a few weird, fun, early-weeks-of-puppy-life facts that might interest brains of whatever size ... The most compelling puppy research in the book comes from work done by the United States military, in what is typically known as the Super Dog program.
Cristina de Stefano, tr. Gregory Conti
Rave Harper\'s What emerges is a powerfully gentle portrait of a willful and imperious child who grows into a willful and imperious adult, one whose central and profound contribution to society is the insight that teachers should heed the willfulness of small children—that children should be emperors of their own education ... De Stefano makes a consistent effort to withhold judgment, choosing instead to pay close and descriptive attention. She also avoids weighing in too much on the pedagogy, claiming that she is not an expert ... The result is a biography written the way a naturalist, or a Montessori protégé, might. Each chapter is short, often between two and four pages, and reads like something between a field note and a pensée ... gives the biography the at once complex and childlike feel of a diorama.
Percival Everett
Rave The New York Times Book Review I happily read whatever Percival Everett writes—over 30 books, to date—not because I will assuredly love every single effort, but because the books always feel like an encounter with substantive, playful thinking. Sometimes, almost indifferently, one of the novels turns out to be truly exceptional and memorable, and confuses me in the best possible way—in the way that makes it endure in my mind, so that I find I’m still thinking about it in an idle moment on a subway, or while walking up stairs...Telephone is one of these standouts ... the way that even the darkest of stories serves as a sanctuary for Wells is surprising and moving. Everett pulls off a gently tremendous technical feat with the accumulated little slips out of the present situation. Each reader will make of her version of the ending what she will. For this reader, the reveries and exits accumulated such that the final and longest slide into the wilderness made the turn to the closing pages sad, affecting and marvelous.
Clarice Lispector, Trans. by Johnny Lorenz
Mixed London Review of Books (UK) Lispector isn’t interested in plot. Her first novel was praised instead for its ‘bewildering verbal richness’. So what is it about this novel—also weird, also dense—that proved even more bewildering than the rest of her work? Part of The Besieged City’s difficulty is its haziness. Lucrécia’s world sharpens up only briefly and intermittently, when looked at directly ... Doesn’t all modernism have a streak of angry adolescence, a pride in being difficult? The Chandelier and The Besieged City aren’t books written on a typewriter on a lap in a noisy room. That is both their strength and their weakness. In these novels, the prose brokers no compromise.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Ingvild Burkey
Mixed London Review of Books With Summer, a feeling of recovery arrives ... It’s a relief for the reader to find herself in one of the long, meandering scenes for which Knausgaard has such a talent. Comedy, which has been largely absent in the quartet, returns ... It feels flattening and wrong to describe this book as a record of his movement towards divorce, yet it also feels absurd not to mention it ... Reading these books [in the Seasons Quartet] I felt at times like I was near a caged animal I desperately wanted to set free. I felt this much more in the quartet than in My Struggle, even though this project is far less straightforwardly autobiographical. In its best pieces, Knausgaard does seem to escape his extreme self-consciousness, if briefly; but then like a kid who manages to tag but immediately gets tagged back, he’s still stuck being It ... About halfway through Summer, Knausgaard’s ‘I’ becomes that of a 73-year-old woman ... A good old-fashioned yarn has sneaked into the project at nearly the last moment. Thank God for the escape, the reader may feel like saying.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by by Ingvild Burkey
Mixed London Review of Books By Spring, the project has broken with its original form and is now framed as a straightforward autobiographical novel ... The shift in form prompts the reader to wonder what kind of work she has been reading. To some extent it is a diary project, but when read as a diary most of its strengths are obscured. It even lacks the thrill of disclosure. A sense of melancholy and privacy—understandable after the revelations of My Struggle—form a dense steam around the author and his thoughts ... On one level, Spring investigates the mystery of the unhappiness of a family living an ordinary, blessed life, with four healthy children and more than enough money. What could there be to be sad about? Knausgaard inspects his own household’s gloom—and his own serial exits from the household—more carefully than in his other works ... The most interesting moments in Spring, however, are the ones that feel off-track ... Although there are many interesting moments in Spring, the reader basically wants out, as the characters do.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Ingvild Burkey
Mixed London Review of Books By the second season Winter, the algorithm—look at something outside one’s self, try to follow the thread—begins to weaken for Knausgaard. Has he exhausted the strategy? One late entry, ‘Habits’, obliquely questions the whole project. The speaker seems to fear he has become too good at the formula ... insights are unstable, and transient; it would be more than misleading for any of them to be center stage for too long as the answer to the mystery that seems to drive Knausgaard’s literary production.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Ingvild Burkey
Positive London Review of Books ...Knausgaard’s Seasons Quartet puts the reader in a highly associative state of mind. Although the medical scenes [in Autumn] experienced by the Knausgaard character don’t have the air of mortality of the spokes of Venus, there is a sense of lugubriousness and depression—Knausgaard’s version of depression often manifesting as a sense of being overwhelmed by the world’s beauty. The quartet... reads as a long record of melancholy.