RaveAsian Review of BooksWhat makes Mark Vanhoenacker’s Imagine a City such a joy, then, is that this is a travel book entirely rooted in modernity and globalization, and thus unbothered by belatedness, but which nonetheless retains the wide-eyed wonder, not so much of a 19th-century explorer as of a medieval pilgrim ... Eschewing linearity for a mosaic form well matched to the discombobulating experience of frequent international air travel, the book arranges its cities into eleven thematic chapters ... Amongst all this there are the snippets of history and cultural information that readers might expect of a travel book, and a good scattering of satisfying factoids ... Vanhoenacker has a fine knack for identifying and naming city-related phenomena ... The individual sections of the chapters provide brief but atmospheric immersions ... The abrupt lurches from place to place can, at times, produce a degree of \'place lag\' for the reader too. This is, surely, the point, though it is generally the more extended meditations on a particular city that are most satisfying ... As much as an account of ceaseless globetrotting, this book is a memoir of a life ultimately rooted in a single place and the way the relationship with that place is both maintained and transformed across a lifetime ... a blissfully un-belated travel book in which form, theme and sensibility are perfectly matched to the realities of modern travel. But it also manages to recapture the old romance of journeying itself, particularly in the sections emphasizing a pilot’s-eye view of the world ... Coming to the end of this book, even the most jaded frequent flyer may find themselves booking a window seat for their next journey, and making plans to get out of the hotel on their next layover.
Kathleen Jamie
RaveThe Asian Review of Books... the individual pieces are so artfully arranged to reflect off one another that they form a tightly coherent whole ... Jamie’s ability to conjure a sense of place is astonishing...there’s a risk of believing one has actually been there in person ... But she is also as concerned with excavating human personalities as the archaeologists are concerned with uncovering walrus ivory artifacts. Diggers and local residents appear, fully formed, by way of a few carefully recorded details and fragments of speech ... The impacts of climate change are made explicit without polemicizing. And the personal themes of time’s passing are made universal without the self-obsession that mars some of travel and nature writing’s tales of \'healing journeys\' ... As always, Jamie’s deft and subtle handling of her themes is aided by the remarkable quality of the writing itself. She is an acclaimed poet, as well as an author of prose, and her writing here certainly has the meticulous precision of poetry. But its fineness has an elusive, quicksilver quality ... Put together, the whole thing shimmers ... Individual lines, containing individual ideas, come with the force of an unexpected blow, leaving the reader briefly giddy.
Eka Kurniawan, Trans. by Annie Tucker
RaveThe Asian Review of BooksEka Kurniawan is the Quentin Tarantino of Indonesian literature: a brash wunderkind, delivering gleeful references to pulp fiction, lashings of stylized violence, and an array of characters and scenarios that far surpass the tropes and clichés which inspire them. But as with Quentin Tarantino, one might occasionally wonder just how much substance lies beneath the indisputably stylish surface ... The vignette structure also lets Kurniawan switch rapidly back and forth between different times and places, allowing him to develop a nifty technique of describing an event and its origins in tandem ... All of this is tremendous fun, even if the brutality is sometimes a little hard to stomach ... Perhaps it is best simply to take it like a Tarantino movie: as a sort of bravura, X-rated pantomime, delivered with style and panache by an author who knows he can get away with just about anything. And as high-end pulp fiction, Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash is superb.
