MixedThe San Francisco ChronicleWhat’s astonishing about the parade of big-brain thinkers who roll by in Jonas Lüscher’s exasperating, if luxuriant, novel Kraft — Heidegger, Schopenhauer, Derrida and the list goes on — is Lüscher’s lack of interest in mixing the lessons of physics with those of the humanities ... Given the setup, it is a lack that haunts the book ... That’s too bad, with the crackling talent often on display, which made me want to read other work by this author ... an able, adroit translation by Tess Lewis with only a handful of slight glitches ... I applaud Lüscher for diving into a timely attempt to grapple with both the reality and the rhetoric of Silicon Valley as a force for change in the world...I can even see his social critique landing with some authority and frisson upon its German-language publication ... For readers of this translation three long years later, here we are, wading through a take on Silicon Valley that feels oddly dated, enduring page after page with a main character the author doesn’t much like, smiling politely through not-that-funny bits like the interminable cheese scene, all with a feeling like that of reading someone else’s high school yearbook. The time frame is all off ... When [Lüscher\'s] focus shifts away from the blathering, self-centered intellectual snob Kraft to other characters, it’s like the sun comes out. The female characters in the book, unlucky enough to have crossed paths with Kraft, feel more alive, even in half-sketch, than Kraft himself ever does, outside of one dramatic dream sequence late in the book.
William T. Vollmann
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleVollmann's aims are bold. His starting point is a pained awareness of the fact that by approaching some unknowable infinity of evil, their examples too extreme to wrap our minds around, the two great criminals of the 20th century exist in most of our imaginations as wax figures in some walled-off freak-show mausoleum of the mind. Ever the provocateur, Vollmann takes on the near-impossible task of crashing through those walls, with the smell of burnt rubber in the air, and pulling Hitler and Stalin back from the useless realm of inert, hardened collective memory. He seeks to reanimate their obscene legacies the only way that actually works – painfully.
Nathan Hill
RaveThe San Francisco Chronicle...we need the restorative space of books more than ever, especially the kind of deceptively profound and rollicking entertainment that Nathan Hill delivers with his debut novel, The Nix, a feat of levitation that wears its seriousness lightly and functions almost as smelling salts for the imagination ... this novel is no ponderous book-length think piece. Above all, it’s a deliciously fun excoriation of so much that demands to be excoriated ... This is a book to get one excited not only about Hill and his future as a novelist, but also about the power of writing to blot out background-noise banality and vault us forward into the new and wondrous.
