RaveChicago Review of Books... the line between written and spoken language deteriorates to the point of nonexistence, the two modes of communication flowing freely between each other throughout the novel ... This new work takes a new path, one that mines the experience of obsession and family, of entropy, and the ceaseless flow of time ... Garréta’s novel truly shines when the entropic nature is subjected to magnification towards the end of the work, as a means to explore how the decisions and nondecisions, rushed choices and cut corners, can misconstrue one’s view of the current of time ... The crystallization of this, the realization of the power of time and the acknowledgement from the child’s point of view of the limitations on modernization and, in this case, concrete, provide the ending that this entropic novel seemed destined to not find, and places Garréta as a distinctly talented writer of fiction, unlike anything else right now.
Dana Spiotta
RaveThe Chicago Review of BooksSpiotta’s novel does an impossible task. The depiction of middle age and motherhood, of divorce and Facebook groups and Medium posts to sign to cancel friends, of a shooting of an unarmed boy by the police as Sam walks around town, the realization that the people walking around you at the State Fair aren’t \'good ole America\' and they also aren’t strictly gun-toting, racist rednecks either—all the clichés are there and yet Spiotta effortlessly shows this as the very tangible, very American reality that it is ... In the same way that Ben Lerner writes about art, and Rachel Cusk writes about her own views on motherhood and family, Spiotta avoids the clichés and corny nature of these topics, and injects a palatable sense of realness to these normal affairs of life, of growing old in the world and in relationships and the changing nature of parenting. She accomplishes this in a supremely polished and measured prose that strays away from the more DeLillo-heavy style of her previous work. Wayward is a novel that captures middle age in all its charms and ugliness, in a way that seemingly only her and a few authors could manage.
Elias Rodriques
RavePloughshares...the novel breaks out into something far more interesting than a typical bildungsroman, a less clearly-charted story blossoming ... Rodriques brilliantly captures this sensation of old lives feeling excluded from \'new ones,\' and how this is used to shape the narratives people that, like Daniel, tell themselves about their lives, which can be a very hard routine to extract oneself from ... The novel shuttles between his family history and Daniel’s current thinking, shaped by dialogue between characters. This is where Rodriques thrives—capturing real, genuine human speech, the cadence of how one speaks at home with old friends, versus in their new lives, away from the memories ... The novel at times drifts towards the kind of clichés that abide in fiction and coming of age stories—the need to get out, to make something of yourself, to escape the treacheries of a life you haven’t chosen. And yet, All the Water I’ve Seen is Running not only examines growing up, leaving home, changing, and then returning, but also examines how masculinity and maleness can ebb and flow depending on context ... In rhythmic prose that belies the seriousness of the topic, Rodriques examines what it is to reconsider male friendship in adulthood, to balance newfound beliefs and acceptances, and to understand that who someone was as a teenager isn’t the person they are now.
Lina Meruane, tr. Megan McDowell
PositiveChicago Review of BooksMeruane...deftly and insightfully looks back at what happens to the mind and body under years of dictatorship in her home country of Chile, while writing and memorializing from the present ... Like any world-altering event, the dictatorship sorted everything into a before and after for Ella, neither of the categories overlapping, always their own distinct realms of time. Yet this novel allows the specter of the trauma of the past to present itself in the actions of the characters of the present, rather than it specifically running and shaping the story. This is where Meruane defines herself away from recent work of other Chilean novelists, like Nona Fernandez or Alejandro Zambra. The dictatorship isn’t the defining aspect or character of this novel, and it shouldn’t be; instead, the novel accounts for how the task of keeping family together can trump almost anything, even health and telling the truth.
Rachel Cusk
MixedVol. 1 BrooklynAt times the relationship between M and L, for all the time spent on it, seems superfluous to the familial details that Cusk focuses on. It’s as if the narrator to the very end believes that L is driving her towards something, that he is pivotal to the story as well as to her relationship with those around her, and so that must be the relationship on which to center the story. This somewhat exasperating way of choosing to narrate a story only serves to highlight how well done Cusk’s first novel after the Outline Trilogy is; it simultaneously dreams of the story wished to be told, while painstakingly giving ground and telling the story that we actually read, one of family relationships strained by the never-ending passage of time ... Even as Cusk writes about the shoddy nature of reaching for some sort of \'higher ideal\' in art, she reminds why she’s actually a one-of-one artist, because the story set out to be told wasn’t told, but maybe it will be next time, and the people around will let you change, or become something new, or realize a truth and be celebrated for it, just maybe that’ll happen.
Juan Villoro, tr. Alfred MacAdam
RaveChicago Review of BooksDating back to 1993, the entries in this diary of a city mostly veer away from the catchalls used commonly when writing about metropolises, and stand as Villoro’s own illustrations of an unfathomably difficult task, placing oneself in the context of a world like Mexico City ... The contents of this book are difficult to encapsulate, if only because they are as wide-ranging as they are detailed ... This conglomeration of Villoro’s memories and writings does not necessitate reading from beginning to end; the book could be opened at any page and the story will exist outside of the rest of the accounts told, connected in no other discernible way to each other except that they both exist in the world of Mexico City ... Horizontal Vertigo stands as a remarkable example of an author who so clearly understands the city he lives in. This is no small feat; the previously mentioned generalizations of metropolises can so easily influence our perceptions of place, and yet Villoro manages for the most part to transcend this tendency towards hyperbole. The picture painted here is distinctly Villoro’s, but this is beneficial in the end. As a way to make meaning out of creations like the \'urban metropolis,\' narratives of the cities are created, making every individuals’ story a fragment, and just that, and Villoro understands this, and this is what ultimately endows his work with such meaning; his awareness that his experience is a only fragment of the whole world around him, and that that still constitutes something worth exploring.
Nona Fernández, tr. Natasha Wimmer
PositivePloughsharesEchoing and emphasizing this reconsideration of the past, Fernandez repeats certain phrases throughout her writing, often referring to the title of the book and specific episodes of the popular television show of the same name, as a way to delve into the fluctuations of memory and to acknowledge the items and thoughts that remain while others slip away, while also highlighting the media and society’s role in what we remember ... Blurring these two worlds, Fernandez argues that evil isn’t exclusively the domain of the villains of our stories and lives, and this becomes the underlying note that ties together the last half of the work ... Fernandez’s novel works like an episode of The Twilight Zone. The dark connections to be made between past and present, friend and foe, evildoer and hero, are only readily apparent after emerging from the hazy world the reader has been immersed in.
