Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, Tessa Hadley’s Free Love, Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, and Isaac Butler’s The Method all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.
1. The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
(Riverhead)
14 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Books of Jacob here
“Dense, monumental … he novel recapitulates an astonishing amount of esoteric learning. Ms. Tokarczuk is as comfortable rendering the world of the Jewish peasantry as that of the Polish royal court. And she has made matters even more challenging for herself—and certainly for her readers—by adopting an experimental narrative technique that draws back from the dramatization of historical events to explore the question of salvation, and of humankind’s perpetual longing for it … An incredibly juicy tale of villainy and intrigue, yet the striking thing about The Books of Jacob is that Ms. Tokarczuk has taken advantage of almost none of the story’s inherent drama … The pace of events never slackens—there is plague, betrayal, imprisonment, war, exile, death and succession—but their presentation is distant and uninvolved, conveyed in summaries rather than engaged re-enactments … The treatment of messianic passions through an attitude of Zen detachment is so pointedly ironic that it colors every aspect of the novel, making this a curiously abstracted historical epic. In Jennifer Croft’s translation—a feat of tremendous diligence and care—the prose remains urbane and unruffled whether it describes religious ecstasy or sickening violence. On the practical level, this makes reading the novel extremely slow going … There are important exceptions to the governing dispassion, however, and they concern the medley of side characters…whom Ms. Tokarczuk allows herself to inhabit more intimately … Difficult and rewarding … Encyclopedic, impersonal, incalculably rich in learning and driven by a faith in the numinous properties of knowledge.”
–Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal)
2. Free Love by Tessa Hadley
(Harper)
8 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Pan
Read an excerpt from Free Love here
“One criticism sometimes levelled at Hadley’s astutely observed narratives is that, for all their finesse, they lack propulsion and verve … Some readers may consider the conclusion of Free Love in similar terms, feeling that the plot fizzles out, or that the resolution for the Fischers is partial or underwhelming. But on rereading, the final pages struck me as achingly moving and real. This novel does not close as a triumphant bildungsroman of middle life, replete with self-discovery. Instead, Hadley’s poignant drawing together of a situation that ultimately becomes ‘as fatally twisted as a Greek drama’ shows a writer with boundless compassion. Yet again, she offers insightful and sensitive understanding of the quiet compromises people make to survive in a deeply compromised world.”
–Michael Donkor (The Guardian)
3. The Pages by Hugo Hamilton
(Knopf)
7 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Hamilton has great fun with the conceit of the book as its own narrator … Yet Hamilton’s underlying purpose is deeply serious. With considerable subtlety he shows contemporary horrors mirroring those of almost a century ago … As befits its narrator, The Pages is full of literary references, in particular to other accounts of love and lovemaking. It offers a richly detailed portrait of Roth himself … At once allusive, playful, contemplative and consequential, The Pages is a remarkable novel, worthy of its great antecedent.”
–Michael Arditti (The Spectator)
4. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu
(Tin House Books)
7 Rave • 1 Positive
“A wildly imaginative collection in which elements of science fiction, fantasy, and even crime fiction blend together in a maelstrom of entertaining darkness that peels away layers of normalcy to reveal the weird, creepy things at the core of each story … Stories that are very different from each other but that share cohesive elements that give the collection a sense of unity … Something Fu does time and again—setting up a wild premise and then using it to make a deeper statement … While each story in Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century takes place in a different world and feels unique, Fu’s obsession with infusing the normal with the supernatural, the weird, the bad side of technology, or the grotesque gives the collection a wonderful sense of cohesion … Full of surprises and strange new things—and those make for truly addictive reading. This collection cements Fu as one of the most exciting short story writers in contemporary literature.”
–Gabino Iglesias (NPR)
5. Vladimir by Julia May Jonas
(Avid Reader Press)
5 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“… a witty dance with the ghost of Nabokov and a razor-edged commentary on academia at our current fraught moment … At the end of the day, these characters may suffer skewering as English professors, and they may suffer skewering as all-too-human lovers, but Jonas seems to take the most pleasure in tormenting them as writers … contains far too many uncomfortable truths to be merely fun, but—especially for those of us with feet in the worlds of academia and literature—it remains, by turns, cathartic, devious and terrifically entertaining.”
–Jean Hanff Korelitz (The New York Times Book Review)
**
1. The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler
(Bloomsbury)
5 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
Listen to an interview with Isaac Butler here
“Thoroughly engrossing … [Butler] handles his material deftly, like a biographer … Butler makes an airtight case for the Method as an artistic revolution on par with other mid-century advances, from improvisation in jazz and stream-of-consciousness in fiction to the flourishes of abstract expressionism in painting … Butler’s book revives the memory of plenty of the Method’s most estimable proponents.”
–James Sullivan (The Boston Globe)
2. Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
5 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from Eating to Extinction here
“Eating to Extinction is a celebration in the form of eclectic case studies … Most of all, Saladino wishes to showcase the treasures we risk losing … Saladino proves that one path to a reader’s sustained attention is through her stomach. Dwelling on local and individual stories is also a way to counterbalance the ghoulish pessimism that can overtake a person when she confronts more than 350 pages’ worth of evidence about our unfolding ecological crisis. The book is explicitly and passionately pedagogical, but it opts for the carrot over the stick. Look at all these earthly marvels! Saladino cries … What Saladino finds in his adventures are people with soul-deep relationships to their food. This is not the decadence or the preciousness we might associate with a word like ‘foodie,’ but a form of reverence. And yet his book is also a form of dark tourism, with doom hovering over each edible miracle. That Saladino is able to simultaneously channel the euphoria of sipping pear cider that smells of ‘damp autumnal forest’ or tasting an inky qizha cake in the West Bank while underscoring the precariousness of these foods makes for a book that is both disturbing and enchanting.”
–Molly Young (The New York Times Book Review)
=3. In the Shadow of the Mountain by Silvia Vasquez-Lavado
(Henry Holt & Company)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“A compelling, experience-rich read … The final chapters, describing Vasquez-Lavado’s path to the summit, are nail-biting and, at times, painfully funny … Her ability to capture the complexity of Everest is flawless and unflinching … In the Shadow of the Mountain has all the elements a great memoir requires—a strong voice, cinematic prose, a hero to root for—in essence, an extraordinary story about an extraordinary woman’s life.”
–Julie Poole (The San Francisco Chronicle)
=3. Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday
(Random House)
4 Rave • 1 Positive
“Wonderful … Think of it as a kind of natural history travelogue … And then unthink that thought, because this is an utterly serious piece of work, meticulously evidence-based and epically cinematic. Or rather, beyond cinematic. The writing is so palpably alive … Halliday is equally attentive to plant and even fungal life—this is not a zoo tour but a series of fecund dioramas … This is a book of almost unimaginable riches … ‘The brightness and diversity of life, its clamour and colour and conflict, leap from the golden siltstone canvas,’ Halliday writes; ‘even the transience of a song, a startling wing-flap, is made solid and lasting.’ That brightness and diversity leaps from Otherlands too. It is a book that will make its own solid and lasting contribution. It could well be the best I read in 2022—and I know it’s only January.”
–James McConnachie (The Sunday Times)
=3. River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads by Cat Jarman
(Pantheon)
4 Rave 1 Positive
“Vikings, both fictional and historical, seem to be everywhere at the moment, and as a result there are more books being published on the topic than even the most ardent aficionado could be expected to read, many of them having little new to say. It is thus quite an achievement for Cat Jarman to have written a book which not only has new things to say to those who have read many other books about Vikings, but also provides an engaging introduction to the study of the Vikings for those who are new to the subject … While opening up the eastern Viking Age to a general audience, Jarman also inducts the reader into the range and wealth of evidence with which Viking scholars grapple. As well as bones and beads, sagas, chronicles and runic inscriptions play their part alongside Thor’s hammers and clinker-built ships in this rich tale of discovery.”
–Judith Jesch (Times Literary Supplement)
