Review by Hilary Plum
It was not until reading Amjad Nasser’s exceptional novel Land of No Rain that I considered just how close the phrase “second person” is to “the double.” In second-person narration, the “you” threaded through the syntax of a novel demands that the reader occupy a life she must pretend is her own. Reading works written in the second person often feels like overhearing someone’s conversation with, or instructions to, herself. In the case of this novel, that premise has been, as it were, doubled: the “you” addressed throughout has, or is, a double. In Nasser’s intricate, mesmerizing prose, we readers become someone we’ve never been, while our protagonist confronts the self he no longer is . . .
Review by Paul Kilbey
What are we laughing at, then? The chiselled precision of Wilde’s play, or the roughly scissored wildness of Barry’s opera? Despite the drastically divergent aesthetics, the answer is both: Barry is canny enough never to drown out the original—rather, the opera provides a remarkably effective means of experiencing the play afresh, both justifying The Importance of Being Earnest's canonical status and reinventing it for a contemporary audience. It’s this bizarre, perhaps unexpected sensitivity that is the primary proof that Barry is not in fact a precocious though impish seven-year-old, but rather a highly talented composer . . .
Review by Walter Gordon
The way in which the novel is written—in conjunction with a few genuine historical similarities—makes it easy to read The King as a sort of playful, metaphorical examination of the Iranian revolution. In this mode, historical fiction becomes a kind of activism, writing allows us to resist through the illumination of the horrors hidden by the triplicate shadows of power, progress, and propaganda, which existed then and exist now . . .
Review by Madison Heying
In the wake of the Napster controversy, literary scholar and composer Andrew Durkin began formulating the conceptual seeds for his Decomposition: A Music Manifesto. He observed that reproducing technology—from the player piano and the gramophone to the Internet and MP3s—had been changing how people listened to music. He had the “suspicion that something important has been ignored or forgotten . . . , obscured by our myths about music.” Myths are the values and beliefs attributed to music and its creators that paint them in a superhuman light. Decomposition was the result of Durkin’s thinking about the ways in which the myths of authorship and authenticity are inexorably shaped by cultural, psychological, economic, and technological factors. If these factors are inescapable, Durkin says, then listeners can—or even must—harness these factors in order to empower themselves to act as creative participants in their musical experiences . . .
Review by Tynan Kogane
Why is Benito Pérez Galdós considered a very important nineteenth-century novelist if no one reads him anymore? He is only rarely summoned from the purgatorial holding cell of dead and forgotten authors, and never definitively. His name doesn’t come up very often in conversation these days, or at least none of the conversations that I overhear. He doesn’t seem to have any literary apostles or outspoken fans, and no one gushes over his work, at least not in the same way that critics and readers occasionally gush over the work of the other European novelists of his generation. What is Galdós’s hook? How do you read (and think about) a so-called major writer whose literary reputation in the English-speaking world is either nonexistent, buried within academia, or the confusing punch line of a complicated joke?
Review by Alex McElroy
Andrés Neuman is unthreatened by borders. If writers are born in response to trauma, then Neuman, the writer, emerged when his family fled Argentina for Granada when he was fourteen. Now Neuman, not yet thirty-seven years old, has already published nearly twenty books, and at the center of his literary endeavors are the repercussions of loss and dislocation. Neuman has spent his career crossing boundaries both literary and geographical, and it feels appropriate that he would tell The American Reader that the move to Granada instilled him with "a sense of strangeness towards geography, towards the space in which you're telling a story, towards the origins of the characters" . . .
Review by Bwesigye bwa Mwesigire
Kintu, a historical novel by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, won the 2013 Kwani? Manuscript Prize. Kwani Trust launched Kintu in Kampala in June and even now, in December, the leading bookstore in the city can’t stock enough copies. The book is literally flying off the shelf. This is odd: most Ugandan bestsellers are also successful around the entire world, but Kintu is hard to come by outside East Africa. Makumbi says that she knew that her book would be hard to sell to Western publishers. “Europe is absent in the novel and publishers are not sure British readers would like it,” she told Aaron Bady of The New Inquiry. “I knew this when I wrote it. I was once told, back in 2004, when I was looking for an agent for my first novel, that the novel was too African. That publishers were looking for novels that straddle both worlds—the West and the Third World—like Brick Lane or The Icarus Girl but I went on to write Kintu anyway.”
Review by P.T. Smith
Limonov , the latest in Emmanuel Carrère's run of novelistic nonfiction, is a wonderful, weird journey. Translated by John Lambert, this biography of Eduard (Eddie) Limonov, a wild Russian, combines the excitement of a thriller with the deep moral questioning of a French philosopher. Its lengthy subtitle-"The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia"-is simultaneously hyperbole and understatement. Limonov is an utterly fascinating figure: a violent, unstable bastard, he's also charming, loyal, and loving. People who enthusiastically agree with him one minute are appalled by his opinions the next. But he's "someone who didn't leave people in the lurch, who took care of them if they were sick or unhappy, even if he didn't have anything good to say about them." Minus the memory loss and the intoxication, his life resembles the Russian drinking binge zapoi . . .
Review by Jennifer Kurdyla
Being greeted by such a friendly face on the cover of The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories would seem nothing but inviting, but Tove Jansson may be counted among those artists who often arouse suspicion: artists who work in multi-hyphened mediums. Encountering such a writer-painter-cartoonist-lyricist gives people pause. Perhaps it’s due to an incredulity of how an individual could be a “master” of more than one thing—all that dabbling must diminish the quality of the work in any single format. Yet Jansson’s affable, trusting visage does not belie an oeuvre any less trustworthy. She’s a wholly suspicion-less, and wholly multi-talented, artist. Reading just one sentence from her published works for adults and children highlights how Jansson’s illimitable energy propelled her to create in so many genres . . .
Review by Patrick Nathan
What drew me to Indigo, the newly-translated novel from Austrian wunderkind Clemens J. Setz, was its premise. Setz imagines an alternate dawn to the twenty-first century wherein a new medical condition is discovered: a congenital disorder that causes—in all those within ten yards of the afflicted—intense vertigo, nausea, and headaches. This condition, affecting a small minority of children all over the globe, tends to fade during late adolescence. The not-quite-PC term is Indigo children, coined from a misunderstood and far-from-scientific “study” involving a mystic, the imagined auras of personality types, and a blindfold testThese children, however mistakenly named, are from then on sought out at infancy, a parent’s every headache under suspicion, every sigh of fatigue analyzed for its cause. Since no one is able to withstand contact for more than a few minutes before vomiting or doubling over in pain, Indigo children are—in a depressingly familiar scenario—gathered up and confined to special schools where, scientists say, they’ll be “better off.” The absurd, deadpan history of Indigo sickness is typical of Setz’s novel, where arbitrary circumstances and emotional impulses have catastrophic effects on human lives . . .
Review by C.D. Rose
It is literature that can perform that vital act of remembering: it is the nature of words, after all, to hold memory. The Temple of Iconoclasts is a vivifying corrective to our all-too-human tendency to forget. It gives names and faces and lives to those who had been unnamed. It restores a reputation to those who have been (perhaps, in some cases, justly) forgotten. The book contains thirty-five brief accounts of the lives of men who have, in some way or another, attempted to challenge the orthodoxies of received belief systems, be they scientific, theological, geographical, cosmological, theatrical, literary, bibliographical, or critical . . .
Review by Keenan McCracken
Occasionally, there are writers we encounter who so pointedly articulate the truth of a particular condition or facet of human existence that they nearly colonize it—Proust and memory, Faulkner and the American South, McCarthy and the nature of evil—writers whose identities become so inextricably linked to that thing that formulating a personal understanding of the subject wholly independent of their writing seems impossible. In the case of Elias Khoury, it is the Palestinian history of exile and war in the twentieth century. For “death,” according to Khoury, “liberates the memory,” and it is by drawing on his firsthand experiences of murder and dislocation that he has created a body of work, including his masterpiece Gate of the Sun, that will very likely be read and remembered decades from now.
Review by Jordan Anderson
This paradox of memory and denial poses a unique problem to artists. They often explore regions of empathy avoided by other sectors of culture, and so they venture furthest into the capacity for empathy with those “forgotten” by society. As such, those artists may have the most profound influence on the moral understanding of our age. By this measure, Naja Marie Aidt undeniably approaches the realm of great artists. Her work, as demonstrated in the recent publication of her short-story collection Baboon, shows the author to be concerned primarily with the use of empathy in its most unromantic form: with people as they are rather than as we would wish them to be . . .
Review by Dustin Kurtz
Early in Paradise & Elsewhere, her latest short-story collection, Kathy Page places readers in an Edenic oasis of plenitude, communal and iridescent, populated by immortal women—a bubble about to be ruptured by a stumbling heat-stricken outsider. The women of this paradise discuss the intruder—a useful gloss of that story and, indeed, the entire book. In these stories Page gives readers a literature of elsewhere, but one in which difference—or, as above, “differentness”—is not a truth laid bare. Oddity, the fantastic, the cruelty that accompanies them, is not the point. Instead it serves only to highlight a longing, across stories and characters, for a kind of transcendent understanding or (and they amount to the same thing) an escape . . .
Review by Jeffrey Zuckerman
“Sometimes words say what they want to say,” the unnamed narrator of David Albahari’s Globetrotter tells himself near the book’s end, “and there is nothing we can do about it.” Instead of “words,” he almost ought to have said “people.” But it would never occur to him to do so: his own loquacity, in fact, is the driving force of Albahari’s novel. The single, unbroken paragraph that flows through Globetrotter’s two hundred pages is narrated entirely in this solitary and self-absorbed voice, working through its obsessions and curiosities with a wide-ranging eloquence . . .
Review by Madeleine LaRue
The Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile works as both a collective coming-of-age story and a prelude to genocide. Through a series of vignettes focusing on individual characters or events, Our Lady of the Nile gradually exposes the fault lines that will, in the end, tear both the eponymous lycée and the country apart. Within these fault lines is a sort of competition, a contest for survival between different ways of being—European and African, Hutu and Tutsi. The competition is deadly for most, but Mukasonga does not strand us in tragedy. She works hard to trace out an authentic, if fragile, means of survival for her protagonists, refusing to succumb, in the end, to total despair . . .
Review by Craig Epplin
“Books for when you’re desperate”: this phrase, drawn from The Savage Detectives—along with the fact that it is identified with the young Roberto Bolaño and his Mexico City literary comrades—underscores the ambition, central to much of the Chilean author’s fiction, of finding ways to make life and literature unfold together. In desperation's grip, literature becomes an urgent, life-and-death matter, the place of everyday ecstasies and miseries. A Little Lumpen Novelita—the last of his novels that Bolaño lived to see published, now translated by Natasha Wimmer—has, at least on the surface, little to say about literature but lots to say about desperation . . .
Review by Timothy Aubry
The Irish novelist Eimear McBride’s debut A Girl is a Half-formed Thing has experienced surprising success given the challenges presented to its readers. The novel’s nameless narrator describes a life emotionally terrorized by two separate traumatic ordeals, and her experiences are reported in a fragmented prose style brashly defiant of practically all grammatical and syntactical conventions. But in many ways, McBride’s novel is less unconventional than it seems . . .
Review by Caroline Bleeke
Elena Ferrante’s narrators, women who employ a viscerally candid first person, speak to us about their childhoods, their morbid fear of becoming their mothers, their daily trials and anxieties, their desire and disgust. They hold nothing back in their interrogations of motherhood, daughterhood, marriage, sex, love, success, and contentment. And Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels—My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, and now Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay—expand outward. They capture not only the intimate musings of a narrator who grows up before our eyes but a panorama of postwar Italy, intricately peopled with a vital supporting cast, including the indelible Lila. Elena’s torturous, lifelong friendship with Lila drives the entire sequence: “her shadow goaded me, depressed me, filled me with pride, deflated me, giving me no rest.” Their mercurial dynamic fuels their lives, which in turn fuel Elena’s stories, the pages we are reading . . .
Review by Meghan Houser
Dispatched from the divide between life and art, Valeria Luiselli’s writing is deeply, inventively concerned with not only defining identity but freeing it from the constraints of definition. Her metaphors are spatial—cities and maps, architecture and navigation—and while she explores how her characters inhabit their physical surroundings, the architecture she’s ultimately concerned with is writing itself, that most elastic human construct. How do we inhabit the invented spaces of language, which, to Luiselli at least, occupy at least as much of our consciousness as the world in which we move? Layering artifice and accident, what she creates are houses of ghosts, but not Allende’s; invisible cities, but not Calvino’s; visceral realism, but not Bolaño’s . . .
