Laura van den Berg’s I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, Zadie Smith’s Intimations, Yiyun Li’s Must I Go, and Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.
1. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears by Laura van den Berg
7 Rave • 1 Positive
“… as in any Van den Berg story, the circumstances are dire without ever falling into the melodramatic. Rather, contemporary existence is dire. What lesser writers might hold up as bitingly satirical, like a man whose job is waiting in line for people to acquire a new electronic or bespoke cronut, Van den Berg presents as a matter of course. The world does not need her narration to invoke a despairing chuckle. Absurdity goes unremarked upon, because it’s the order of the day, and she has much more interesting things to say … Above all, Van den Berg is a writer of wonderous understatement. Her stories end with readers feeling they have Wile E Coyote’d their way off a cliff and are only now realizing there is no ground left beneath them. Van den Berg’s introspective narration assures she is falling with us and is just as scared to find out where we are going to land—if we are going to survive.”
–Carl Lavigne (Ploughshares)
Listen to Laura van den Berg and Catherine Lacey in conversation here
2. Afterland by Lauren Beukes
4 Rave • 5 Positive
“… the book shines as one of the best thought experiments of its kind, in which Beukes has stitched together the surprise matriarchy of The Power, the millenarian despair of Children of Men and the deeply intelligent questions of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness … Yet it isn’t all nihilism. Beukes seeds the book with hopeful rumours of matriarchal societies that have sprung up in other countries. There are never many details beyond the promise, like mirages just over the horizon … Afterland is that rare creature, a ripping tale that neither shies away from big questions nor interesting answers. What happens when the powerless get power? There is no guarantee that the previously oppressed will wield it any more judiciously than those who oppressed them. It isn’t about the individuals. It is about the society they need to maintain.”
–Sally Adee (New Scientist)
3. The Wild Laughter by Caoilinn Hughes
4 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
“… a razor-sharp snapshot of a family and a nation in trouble, in language that is vital and richly inventive … That Hughes manages to breathe so much life into such a depressing and well-trodden period of recent Irish history is a remarkable achievement … The tragicomic style is reminiscent of Kevin Barry, the brutal truths told in a slick, offhand manner. In The Wild Laughter, there are frequent flashes of humour delivered in a style that uses exaggeration to great effect to point out the absurd (and the blindingly obvious) … From the opening pages, the narrative is appropriately fast-paced, swerving from scene to scene…There is a maniacal quality to proceedings that makes the loss more gut-wrenching when it comes … Hughes has interesting things to say on various cherished Irish institutions: the theatre, the Catholic Church, the idealised matriarch figure … [The Wild Laughter] will surely see her gain further acclaim—it’s an exhilarating and moving story of an Ireland in disarray.”
–Sarah Gilmartin (The Irish Times)
Read a story by Caoilinn Hughes here
4. A Star is Bored by Byron Lane
2 Rave • 6 Positive
“… wildly funny and irreverent … Nearly every sentence Kathi utters is darkly comic … if penis jokes don’t make you crack a tiny smile, then it’s likely this novel isn’t for you … He’s at his best when he allows his quirky characters to take over, especially when he describes Kathi and Charlie’s extensive travels … Charlie’s foggy friendship with Kathi defies convention, and Lane’s writing lifts the novel far above its gossamer Hollywood setting, suffusing his portrait of Kathi with a complex sensitivity … At the end of the novel, I felt a deep sense of grief for Carrie Fisher, who died in 2016. This story made me long for a universe in which Charlie and Kathi could be action figures themselves: icons whose sensitivity is a superpower that can save us.”
–Margo Rabb (The New York Times Book Review)
Read an interview with Byron Lee here
5. Must I Go by Yiyun Li
2 Rave • 5 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Lilia Liska…is a fascinating character, filled with resentment and regret, but compelling enough that the reader is unable to look away … Lilia is a true original, and Li wisely lets her speak for herself through the bulk of the book as she riffs on Roland’s writing. Li does a wonderful job of letting readers decide how much of what Lilia says is true grit, and how much is the bravado of a proud but wounded woman. Must I Go is a triumph of a novel about how we navigate grief that seems unmanageable.“
–Michael Schaub (The Star Tribune)
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1. Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey
13 Rave • 2 Positive
“Nothing she has written drills down into her past, and her family’s, as powerfully as Memorial Drive. It is a controlled burn of chaos and intellection; it is a memoir that will really lay you out … This is a book with a slow, steady build. This is restraint in service to release … This memoir has eddies of joy and celebration. Trethewey writes memorably about the music Gwendolyn loved … The second half, unexpectedly, dumps a bag of harrowing receipts on the table. Thanks to a police officer who had been the first on the scene, Trethewey has access to…her mother’s police statements…transcripts of telephone calls … Trethewey dispenses this material to powerful effect … Memorial Drive closes like a door sucked shut by the wind … Even though you intuit what is coming, the moment you learn of Gwendolyn’s death is…stunning.”
–Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
2. Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith
6 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“A novelist at heart, Smith writes essays that scarcely abide by the current understanding of the form. She doesn’t buttonhole her reader with fervent arguments and rarely brandishes a suitable object for blame. And while one of the pieces in Intimations concerns suffering, Smith seems allergic to the notion of testifying to her own in any detail. She’s ambivalent, sometimes rueful, often self-deprecating. Her first inclination is to laugh at herself … That’s the scale of Intimations: the human comedy … To read Zadie Smith is to recognize how few writers seem to genuinely love human beings the way she does, with such infinite curiosity and attention, even when they are behaving monstrously. Or, for that matter, how few are able to do justice to what, for want of a better term, we’ll call common decency.”
–Laura Miller (Slate)
3. To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq by Robert Draper
4 Rave • 3 Positive
“The serial mistruths, mistakes and misperceptions about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged support for Al Qaeda are laid out in devastating detail in Robert Draper’s authoritative new book … This is well-trod history, but Draper mines newly declassified documents and tracks down previously unavailable CIA and Defense officials to flesh out the sordid story of the run-up to the March 2003 invasion, the start of a grinding conflict that would last eight years and claim nearly 4,500 American lives … Draper has written a compelling narrative of just how calamitous an ideology-first approach to fact-finding can be in the White House, and why Americans were so badly deluded … Draper has written the most comprehensive account yet of that smoldering wreck of foreign policy, one that haunts us today.“
–Bob Drogin (The Los Angeles Times)
4. Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town by Barbara Demick
5 Rave • 1 Positive
“The method is programmatic openness, deep listening, a willingness to be waylaid; the effect, a prismatic picture of history as experienced and understood by individuals in their full amplitude and idiosyncrasy … masterly … Demick covers an awe-inspiring breadth of history—from the heyday of the Tibetan empire, which could compete with those of the Turks and Arabs, to the present day, as the movement for Tibetan independence has faltered and transformed into an effort at cultural and spiritual survival. She charts the creative rebellions of recent years, the efforts at revitalizing the language and traditions, Tibetans’ attachment to the Dalai Lama (and their criticisms). Above all, Demick wants to give room for contemporary Tibetans to testify to their desires.”
–Parul Sehgal (The New York Times)
5. Is Rape a Crime?: A Memoir, an Investigation, and a Manifesto by Michelle Bowdler
4 Rave • 2 Positive
“Bowdler’s combined memoir and manifesto is provocative and illuminating … Her analysis of the lack of investigation into rape cases and lenient sentencing for convicted rapists strengthens her argument that rape is not treated as a crime in the way that other felonies are. Bowdler’s memoir is a thought-provoking, personal account of violence and its long-lasting ripples.”
–Laura Chanoux (Booklist)
Read an excerpt from Is Rape a Crime? here
