Book Reviews
GLORIOUS NEMESIS by Ladislav Klíma
Book Reviews
‘He was a social democrat and a fool, but may the Lord grant him eternal glory.’ There is a moment in Ladislav Klíma’s previous novel from Twisted Spoon Press, The Sufferings of Prince, where the poor prince, an aristocrat and favourite of the German Kaiser,…
read »
LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION by Ben Lerner
Book Reviews
Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press) marks the poet’s first foray into prose fiction—with, it has to be said, very impressive results. This is an unusual American novel, sensitive to contemporary politics, absorbent of modern technology, weary of the easy consolations of…
read »
LAMBERTO, LAMBERTO, LAMBERTO by Gianni Rodari
Book Reviews
There exists an old adage, or so we’re told in Gianni Rodari’s Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto (Melville House), “that the man whose name is spoken remains alive.”
read »
DUKLA by Andrzej Stasiuk
Book Reviews
You will be reading Dukla (Dalkey Archive Press), Andrzej Stasiuk’s meditation on the titular Polish resort town, and suddenly you will realize you haven’t been reading at all. You’ve been lost in a complicated daydream, entranced by a wash of above-ground light through a subway…
read »
LIGHTNING RODS by Helen DeWitt
Book Reviews
“It’s not for everyone,” explains Joe, proprietor of Lightning Rods, Inc., to a bewildered new applicant. “We’re looking for the kind of woman who is confident about herself. The kind of woman who has aims she wants to achieve. We’re looking for someone with maturity…
read »
CHILD WONDER by Roy Jacobsen
Book Reviews
Khaled Mattawa, a leading English translator of Arabic poetry, often raises the issue of how a book might travel out of one culture and into another. From thematic incongruities, to language barriers (idioms, tenses, slang), to unshared histories, not all books achieve what they are…
read »
THE LAKE by Banana Yoshimoto
Book Reviews
The mystery at the heart of The Lake lies in Nakajima's past--a traumatic childhood event that has left him "extremely frail." As Nakajima begins to heal, in part due to Chihiro's strength, and in part through visits to the titular lake, the tragic events of his past come to light.
read »
THE FASTER I WALK, THE SMALLER I AM by Kjersti A. Skomsvold
Book Reviews
“Why bother?” From the mouth of a stubborn pubescent, this question usually gets a smirk. However, in the case of Mathea Martinsen, the protagonist of Kjersti A. Skomsvold’s touching and spare debut, THE FASTER I WALK, THE SMALLER I AM (published by Dalkey Archive Press,…
read »
THE NEW MOSCOW PHILOSOPHY by Vyacheslav Pyetsukh
Book Reviews
‘The meaning of life is purely a Russian fabrication. We fabricated it for the very same reason the Asians fabricated Buddhism: presumably from want of life’s basic necessities.’ Vyacheslav Pyetsukh’s THE NEW MOSCOW PHILOSOPHY reads like an anthology of short stories from Russia’s finest writers…
read »
IN RED by Magdalena Tulli
Book Reviews
The mythical town of Stitchings is coming apart at the seams: unfortunate deaths riddle the town, snow never melts, the people are preoccupied with war, and monkeys from a traveling circus have put counterfeit money into circulation, ruining the local economy. In Magdalena Tulli’s In Red, beautifully translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston, we follow the evolution of a small, dreamlike town that itself is the novel’s protagonist just as much as it is its antagonist.
read »
Jesmyn Ward - SALVAGE THE BONES
Book Reviews
Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury) is a slow burn over the eleven days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, following the life of Esch, a pregnant teen in rural Louisiana who is obsessed with the story of Medea and her neighbor, Manny. Esch is…
read »
Rae Bryant THE INDEFINITE STATE OF IMAGINARY MORALS
Book Reviews
Rae Bryant’s The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals (Patasola Press) is a book about love and sex, but that description is the only one that will make Morals seem typical. Bryant has a unique curiosity with the tools and the products of human relationships—naked bodies,…
read »
NETSUKE by Rikki Ducornet
Book Reviews
Netsuke (Coffee House Press) opens with a loathsome scene of debauched lust, and from there goes further and further down the rabbit hole into the twisted wonderland of the narrator’s mind. But do not turn away from the dark, because what Rikki Ducornet has managed…
read »
LECHE by R. Zamora Linmark
Book Reviews
A novel of place and character, R. Zamora Linmark‘s Leche (Coffee House Press) focuses on six days in the life of Vicente “Vince” de Los Reyes, as he returns to his birthplace, the Philippines, after thirteen years of living in Hawaii. As he travels to…
read »
Fiasco by Imre Kertész
Book Reviews
Where Imre Kertész’s literature differs – as recognized by the Nobel committee – is in the way it tackles the complicated relationship between history and art, addressing the author’s own discomfort at being a ‘Holocaust novelist’, questioning his own reasons for writing and demanding answers, as opposed to following a strict autobiographical format.
read »
The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert
Book Reviews
In the 262 pages of The Coffins of Little Hope (Unbridled Books), Timothy Schaffert packs 61 chapters, 11 “parts,” a kidnapping drama, a bestselling children’s fantasy series, a local newspaper’s struggle to survive, and an overflowing small town milieu including an elderly obituary writer, an…
read »
The Dewey Decimal System by Nathan Larson
Book Reviews
A Scanner Darkly gave us a would-be sleuth befuddled by drug addiction; Memento delivered exposition in a way that mirrored the protagonist’s memory loss; Motherless Brooklyn cracked the classic gumshoe’s invulnerable façade by reimagining him as governed by Tourettic compulsions. But The Dewey Decimal System does all of the above – and then some.
read »
VOLT by Alan Heathcock
Book Reviews
Populated by folks scraping by under the poverty line in a rural setting, Alan Heathcock’s Volt (Graywolf Press) easily qualifies as country noir, Winter’s Bone with fewer meth addicts. A son helps his injured father drag a body up a hill, wrapped in a handmade…
read »
Suicide by Edouard Levé
Book Reviews
This short book’s force is in its specificity. It evokes the experience of a certain person – what he thought, felt, and sensed – until he decided to take his own life.
read »
Haywire
Book Reviews
Though lacking an overarching story, the book covers the major phases of the protagonist’s life, and is held together by motifs – the father’s trips to the bar, a girl with a small red mark on her cheek, excursions into nature, and sexual fetish.
read »
Separate Kingdoms by Valerie Laken
Book Reviews
It’s not uncommon these days to hear a literary critic bemoan the decline of the short story. But despite the handwringing, the last decade has given us some extraordinary short story collections, often introducing great young literary talents like Yiyun Li and Jhumpa Lahiri, or…
read »
Happy Birthday, Turk!
Book Reviews
It’s too bad for Kayankaya that he lacks the snap of his name, and isn’t able to hold his own even in an exchange with his physician.
read »
The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah
Book Reviews
There exists a brand of individual whose life comes down to a story: men and women whose lives are irrevocably defined by a series of indelible childhood events. We know little of the life story of Raj, the protagonist of Nathacha Appanah‘s The Last Brother,…
read »
Gryphon
Book Reviews
In other words, what about adults? Is there a place for them in the modern short story? Gryphon says yes.
read »
The Correspondence Artist
Book Reviews
Barbara Browning’s exciting debut novel, The Correspondence Artist, published by Two Dollar Radio, revolves around four love stories, all of which are actually the same love story, but none of which are the real, or true, story. Confused?
read »
Spurious
Book Reviews
“‘Conversation!’, exclaims W. That’s what friendship’s all about.” And this is a novel made up almost entirely of conversations.
read »
It is late at night in a train station in the Uttar Pradesh province in Northern India. Four men of various ages are sharing the waiting room when a young couple walks in, then walks out.
read »
Stone Upon Stone
Book Reviews
Translated from Polish by Bill Johnston, who received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in Translation, Stone Upon Stone by Wieslaw Myśliwski is built on big questions about spirituality and relationship to place.
read »
Changing the Subject
Book Reviews
If his new short story collection Changing the Subject has an ambitious title, Stephen-Paul Martin gets away with it. And it’s not only because of his change-ups between eco-terrorism, women with nice teeth, dogs, Macbeth, various assassinations of President Bush, and animated billboards depicting Custer taking Tylenol before his last stand.
read »
Cut Throat Dog
Book Reviews
Putting aside its kitsch and recent surge in popularity, the spy genre can be engrossing and worthwhile if it is innovative. If it rests on a muddled mix of clichés, as Joshua Sobol’s novel Cut Throat Dog does, the result is less suspenseful than a cookbook.
read »
The Universe in Miniature in Miniature
Book Reviews
Human beings have two systems for making sense of their universe, two ways of understanding the seemingly unfathomable pain and suffering and sorrow and even beauty of their lives. The first is art, and the second is science. In his exquisite collection of linked short stories, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, author Patrick Somerville illustrates the appeal – and the shortcomings – of both approaches, and leaves the reader all the more astonished with the mystery that is existence.
read »
The Brothers Ashkenazi
Book Reviews
This autumn witnesses a wonderful event in the world of literature: the re-publication of a forgotten classic.
read »
Daddy’s
Book Reviews
In these “24 fictions” many characters (male and female alike) are decidedly consumed by their fathers – both literally, in ambiguously miserable dealings, and metaphysically, through long-tentacled memories groping, groping with their tainted touch.
read »
The Insufferable Gaucho
Book Reviews
In The Insufferable Gaucho, we leave Bolaño ’s usual Chilean émigrés, whores, poets, and gangsters, and have, instead, horses and knife fights, strumming guitars and, of course, gauchos. We have the theme of recovering honor in a changing, shameless world. We have Bolaño ’s homage to Borges.
read »
Extraordinary Renditions
Book Reviews
Why would I read a book by a young American writer about what it’s like to be an old Hungarian composer? Especially an old Hungarian composer who was at Terezín?
read »
Pirate Talk
Book Reviews
“Pirates are a perfect picture of a person piecemeal, falling apart,” a character pronounces near the end of Terese Svoboda’s Pirate Talk or Mermalade. Given the novel that precedes this statement, it’s hard to deny its truth.
read »
Pee on Water
Book Reviews
If you’re our age and into fiction you have to act like there’s a lot of new stuff out there to know about – secret, underground literary things that are making things new again. There isn’t. It’s no one’s fault.
read »
The Distant Sound
Book Reviews
Gert Jonke opens The Distant Sound with a delightfully lyrical, neurotically brilliant, yet utterly baffling lament. Greeted with such an enticingly cluttered and self-involved prosaic, one is aware from the outset of the author’s mocking presence within the novel – Jonke has us and will continue to menacingly jab our sides throughout.
read »
Richard Yates
Book Reviews
Lin’s new novel, Richard Yates, tries another strategy. Here we follow a relationship between two young writers as it forms, intensifies, and falls apart, and we’re given what feels like everything.
read »
The Kasahara School of Nihilism
Book Reviews
Writers like Mark Z. Danielewski (in the magnificent House of Leaves) and Steven Hall (in the pulpy, fun Raw Shark Texts) have discovered ways of using innovative typography to drive story forward, sometimes by highlighting the mental states and obsessions of the characters, sometimes by imitating the techniques of film. Yet in this “novel” (as the publisher refers to it – I’d describe it as either a novella or a narrative poem), the plentiful empty space on the page is just that: a blank left for the reader to fill in.
read »
You Were Wrong
Book Reviews
With its light tenor and hard to pin humor, Matthew Sharpe’s new novel You Were Wrong is a smartly enjoyable inquiry into the unfortunate situation of Long Island high school math teacher Karl Floor.
read »
Review of Am I a Redundant Human Being?
Book Reviews
Am I a Redundant Human Being? This question is the title of Austrian writer Mela Hartwig’s early 20th-century novel – now out from Dalkey Archive Press in a translation by Kerrie Pierce – and Hartwig gives it to a relentlessly wordy, wildly contradictory, and sadistic narrator to answer. Aloisia Schmidt is a lonely young woman whose only means of holding herself together is to pit herself against herself in a masturbatory mental trial in which she plays all roles: jury, judge, defendant, and victim. She leaves little room for anyone else’s interpretation – even yours. This is a one-woman show.
read »
The Overton Window Review
Book Reviews
“The public has lost their courage to believe. They’ve even given up their ability to think. They can no longer even form their opinions, they absorb their opinions, sitting slack-jawed in front of their televisions.” ~Glenn Beck, p. 42, The Overton Window, apparently written without…
read »
Whitehorn’s Windmill
Book Reviews
Upon beginning Kazys Boruta’s novel Whitehorn’s Windmill or The Unusual Events Once Upon a Time in the Land of Paudruvė, the reader will first be struck – and perhaps put off – by the simple, informal prose and fairy-tale setting. But this mid-20th-century Lithuanian classic – now out in an English translation from Central European University Press – is anything but provincial. Boruta weaves witches, old crones, morose devils, and talking animals together with the poetics of the most sophisticated – and pessimistic – European modernism.
read »
Three Delays
Book Reviews
Don’t ask me about the three delays of Charlie Smith’s new novel, Three Delays. Who or what’s delayed, when, why – whether there are any delays at all – I couldn’t tell you.
read »
Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever
Book Reviews
Intentionally or not, there’s much about Justin Taylor’s debut collection that leans towards earnest generational portraiture, what Fredric Jameson called “taking the temperature of an age.” Goths, grunge kids and anarcho-punks emerge as nostalgic figures of a 90s suburban landscape. These are the bored young things who curate their identities by the bands they listen to, the mall accessories they choose to wear. The kids hang out, drop acid, experiment with sexual identities, find each other in twin-size beds and part ways ruefully. Yet despite their follies and privileges they are not altogether unlovable.
read »
Primeval and Other Times
Book Reviews
Tellingly, in the original Polish, Primeval is ‘Prawiek’; translatable as ‘Long Ago’, the term also describes old-woodlands found throughout Eastern Europe. It is here, amongst these dense forests, that the sphere of the sacred blends with the profane, as mystical phenomena, Catholicism, holiness and spirituality intertwine with the everyday. A microcosm of Polish towns of the period, Primeval is to Tokarczuk what Visĕgrad was to Ivo Andrić in The Bridge over the Drina. The author is the village’s chronicler and documents what she feels is worthy of retelling, combining fact and fiction to serve her own myth-making purpose.
read »
Self-Portrait Abroad
Book Reviews
For years I’ve been telling friends, acquaintances, even people at parties I speak to for five minutes, to read Jean-Philippe Toussaint. But I always have difficulty recommending a novel of his to start with. Though Toussaint is never less than lucid, nuanced, and very funny, and, like Chaplin or Woody Allen, frequently features the same protagonist – a resolutely passive upper-middle-class intellectual who somehow keeps getting into slapstick situations – there isn’t a single one of his books that shows off all he can do.
read »