RaveNew York Times Book ReviewEven as Carrère regards his own meditation practice with ironic detachment, he has a genuine feeling for his tai chi and Iyengar masters. He gnaws at that contradiction in ways that bear, with humor and wit, on his own literary project ... Like tai chi, Carrère’s confessional mode of writing, deftly captured here in John Lambert’s translation, demands that he move \'as slowly and as fast\' as he can — \'to meditate, and to kill\' ... Carrère’s gift is to relate all this with the intimacy of a diarist. His books, associative and digressive, move with ease between observer and participant, between small, recollected moments and incommensurable realities. In exploring his own consciousness, he seems also to explore ours ... The absence of his wife goes some way toward explaining one of the weaknesses of the book: The women in it are mainly outlines, which he fills in with his desires or his needs. If his depictions at times ring false, so too do some of the story lines required by the fictive turn Yoga takes ... Accustomed to feeling as if we are in intimate dialogue with Carrère, we can’t help wondering what he held back. At the same time, he suggests, if we sometimes gin up stories (as the migrants may have done), it may simply be because the ones we long to tell cannot be made accessible to others. Our suffering is no less horrible, our moments of lucidity no less hard-earned.
César Aira tr. Chris Andrews
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... a characteristically slim 98-page volume that presents as many riddles as answers, in which, in fact, the riddles are the answers ... deftly translated ... rendered as a series of surreal, often hilariously absurd vignettes ... Reading Aira can feel like being inside a picture, sliding from one plane of color to another, only to find yourself following a figure that suddenly slips outside the frame ... Aira captures the texture of the world by flying away from it. Rather than a rejection of reality, his dreamlike sequences are an acknowledgment of it, \'confirming, had there been any doubt, that there is no other world than this\' ... In someone else’s hands, this might feel like a trick, but in Aira’s it is magical. With characteristic lightness he encapsulates, with a final narrative twist, the small, often funny turns that shape his captivating tales. If, as Aira writes, \'the games that Borges played with space-time in his work were secondary to his art of storytelling,\' so too, it turns out, are Aira’s.
Mia Couto Trans. by David Brookshaw
RaveThe New York Times\"Set in the late 19th century and skillfully translated by David Brookshaw, this is the first novel of a trilogy about the last days of the \'so-called State of Gaza.\' This vast African empire, led by the legendary warrior-chief Ngungunyane, once covered much of what is now Mozambique. To give birth to his embattled world, Couto, a recent finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, draws from a trove of historical documents, alternating between the perspective of a disgraced Portuguese sergeant, Germano de Melo, who is consigned to a remote area of what, as he puts it, \'we so pompously call Lands of the Crown,\' and that of a young VaChopi girl, Imani, who serves as his translator. From the myths that swirled around Ngungunyane (and still do), Couto conjures what he has described as the \'many and small stories\' out of which history is made, offering a profound meditation on war, the fragility of empire and the ways in which language shapes us ... Imani’s speech, much like Couto’s, is both her own and delivered in a borrowed tongue. Couto, a \'white man who is African,\' as he describes himself, also tells the stories of those who write their names in \'the dust and ashes,\' capturing through their landscape — and the language of those who have invaded it — an unwritten history.\
