RaveThe BelieverThis book blurs the lines of genre convention and polyvocality by assembling a multivoiced collage of texture, feeling, and evidence. Sycamore works with archival materials, resuscitated and reconstructed memory, and interviews to produce a collection that’s part art history, part art theory, and part memoir, collapsing the spaces between authorship and authority, and between knowledge production and inheritance ... Modular, wide-ranging, and lyric ... Resonates on multiple levels. It is both one person’s attempt at getting closer to a person and the art form they worked in, and it is asking us, the reader, to do this as well.
Yan Ge tr. Jeremy Tiang
MixedThe Wall Street JournalHenrik’s narration, which stretches over more than a decade, is portioned into halting episodes about friends and lovers whose role in his life tend to be spectral and short-lived ... a sensitive, vague and often maddeningly insubstantial novel. Its frustrations are illustrative of a crisis in the subject and form of a literature that takes trauma to be the defining quality of personhood. However ugly or disillusioning it may be, Mavis Gallant’s deromanticized Paris is tactile and interesting, teeming with personalities. But because Mr. Kim’s is characterized by an inviolable sense of detachment, it is doomed to remain unrealized, a shadowy backdrop for his sad hero’s tail-swallowing cycle of fear and regret.
Allan Gurganus
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Gurganus is compelled by the grotesque and the miraculous alike, so his stories shift from recounting an act of depravity at a funeral home to unfolding the incredible tale of a child who was carried across town by a cyclone and lived to tell about it. Wonder is the common denominator; Mr. Gurganus’s narrators are constantly struck by the irreducible strangeness of ordinary existence ... the stories are as much about the telling as the events. They’re blowsy, protracted, full of hemming and hawing. Like the old-timer beside you at the diner counter, they take a certain mischievous pleasure in withholding the endings to keep the audience captive ... The payoffs do eventually arrive with wonderful revelatory flourishes that burnish the legend of Mr. Gurganus’s everyman town.
