...Spanish-Argentine writer Andrés Neuman manages to merge disaster, memory, and distance into a single cohesive map ... Like the functional and decorative art of kintsugi—mending a shattered piece of pottery with gold or silver, highlighting the cracks—that fascinates his protagonist Yoshie, Neuman knows that the ways in which we’re broken not only form an essential fabric of our being, but often remake us in entirely new ways ... The translation from Nick Caistor and Lorenza García is to be applauded. It’s hard to imagine a more daunting task as a translator: Fracture combines not only a globe-trotting vocabulary, but also examines the differences between grammar structures across Japanese, French, English and Spanish. Often, Yoshie’s zeal for learning languages plays center stage ... The true difficulty with the novel comes with the manner of the construction. By relying heavily on the direct accounts of those who knew Yoshie most intimately rather than on his own perspective, much of the action is deflated. Even as the novel works to show the true human cost of the disasters that are often condensed to statistics, it’s a point illustrated from a cautious distance ... In Fracture, Neuman sets out to show the loss of global disasters through the frame of the individual. I can’t help but consider the novel in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that is affecting millions around the globe. That’s the thing about disasters, about tragedy: it feels impossible until it’s happening to you. Now, the disaster is everywhere; though not everyone is affected equally. Living through this disaster as it unfolds only proves how accurate Fracture is.

Reading Andrés Neuman’s nostalgic Fracture, which centers partly on the Fukushima nuclear disaster, could be a fraught experience during a pandemic — and, indeed, many of the main characters’ convoluted feelings are likely to resonate with, and unsettle, the reader. The author’s skill, however, makes this compelling story well worth the emotional investment ... These women could easily have become simply foils for Watanabe’s inner journey. To Neuman’s credit, however, they are each deeply complicated characters with correspondingly conflicted wants and needs ... Neuman has done a masterful job sharing with us what goes on inside his head, and this book is an excellent choice for anyone who enjoys examining relationships in the face of tragedy.

A prolific writer, Neuman delights in language and linguistic ambiguity. In Fracture, he explores the fragmented nature of memory, emotional scars, a city’s wounds after a disaster and the cracks in a relationship caused by cultural difference. He draws profound parallels between collective traumas ... poignant lyricism ... Perceptively translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, Fracture is a novel for our times and astonishingly relevant. Radiation, like coronavirus, is an invisible killer. After Fukushima, the official communications about the catastrophe prove unreliable.

Fracture is by far the Argentinian writer Andrés Neuman’s most successful experiment ... Neuman writes prose like a poet ... There is quite a lot of stylistic pouncing—the novel proceeds in continual leaps and bounds ... perhaps that which should be said must be said—and Neuman undoubtedly says it beautifully ... important. True.

A talented travel writer, inventive storyteller, and acclaimed novelist, Neuman presents a realist novel told in an unconventional style which centers around one man’s life as refracted through the viewpoints of numerous women who knew him ... Speaking from different times in Watanabe’s life and four locales—France, New York, Argentina, and Spain—the women share their experiences, piecing together a multifaceted portrait of an enigmatic man ... Another fascinating work of fiction from a generously prolific author.

Neuman succeeds in individualizing and exposing his female characters based entirely on their monologs, a format that recalls his earlier Talking to Ourselves. He also cautions about the dangers of repeated nuclear disaster from Hiroshima to Fukushima ... The fragmented and destructive power wielded by memory and trauma in developing one’s outlook on life, coupled with a two-pronged narrative technique for character development, makes Neuman’s latest a winner.

For all its high ambition and storytelling skill, Fracture inevitably has a few cracks and chips itself. The four women’s soliloquies do not always sound distinctive enough. Yoshie’s partners have to double up as witnesses who speak in character, and omniscient narrators with the day’s headlines to hand. Some of the public histories they sketch—of countercultural New York in the Vietnam War era, for example—feel like routine backdrops. Still, Mr. Neuman’s accomplished translators, Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, work hard to endow each of the quartet with an accent and timbre of her own. And they shine in the visionary opening and closing sections, as Yoshie sets out to visit post-meltdown Fukushima. His drive toward the wrecked plant takes him through a landscape of calamity evoked in spare but mesmerizing prose ... Fracture both advocates the value of kintsugi, of mending in plain sight, and embodies it. In the wake of our present trauma, we may need that art again.

The women are interesting reflections here—there's a fellow student Yoshie has a fevered romance with in Paris; a politically active journalist he has a combative liaison with in New York; an interpreter in Buenos Aires; and a widow with three children in Madrid. The uniformity of the women's cadence and vocabulary tarnishes their individuality a bit, but the story remains a moving meditation on the reverberating waves that shape us and the inescapable impermanence of life ... A quiet study of a man struggling to find a serenity to quell his long-entrenched terror.