PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksMight be the closest thing Canetti ever gets to an equivalent tribute by a 21st-century talent. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and essayist Joshua Cohen has drawn from old and new translations of Canetti’s autobiographies, voluminous collections of his notes and aphorisms, and his sole published work of prose fiction...to create a primer on one of the great questing voices of the 20th century ... Cohen admits that he stripped some of these pages almost arbitrarily from the walls of Canetti’s vast mind palace — whatever bright details caught his eye on a given day ... For all the biographical ground covered in this volume, there is not much about Canetti’s personal affairs in adulthood, literal or figurative.
Haruki Murakami, Trans. by Philip Gabriel
MixedThe Herald (UK)Murakami seems to be repeating himself, thematically and even grammatically ... Whether this clumsy phrasing is deliberate, or possibly the fault of his regular translator Philip Gabriel, the reflexive response is: \'Who cares?\' Female readers new to, or tired of, Murakami’s tics may be further exasperated by the women described here in terms of their beauty, or lack of it ... It is sad too that Murakami should turn to such banal expressions of nostalgia when he used to evoke loss and regret so much more obliquely. This new near-directness works in places, though ... Last and best is the title story ... At his strongest he’s like Kafka in Tokyo, and reminds the lapsed admirer what a weird power Murakami once had over them.
Simon Stephenson
RaveThe Scotland Herald (UK)Jared’s sad yet chipper register sets a breezy tone against a semi-satirical dystopian backdrop, never dwelling too long on the Great Crash that downed all the world’s aeroplanes, or the nuclear exchange that destroyed North Korea and New Zealand, or Elon Musk’s accidental incineration of the moon. There’s a does-not-compute strain of comedy to his observations on the habits of our species and a melancholy heft to his more sombre insights ... What comes across most strongly is a love of popular movies and a deeply felt reflection on what they tell us about ourselves. Maybe Stephenson’s idea was to bypass the frustrations of pitching and selling scripts with a novel so obviously adaptable as to shift him to the top of the pile. In which case, job done ... But even before we enjoy it on screen, we can appreciate his mastery of the formulas and stratagems by which character and plot can mine us for empathy – the benevolent exploitation that all good stories rely upon. There may be something too cute about Jared for some, and this reader did not care for his constant exclamation marks, but only the truly heartless would deny the art at work here, or the attendant swell of pride.
