Review by Jeffrey Stuker
To “take a closer look,” for Arasse, meant first to acknowledge the presence of zones of unintelligibility in a sequence of representations from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. His déscriptions articulate the place where this erudite historian of art and we, his readers, initially think we don’t see a thing. On n’y voit rien: déscriptions could be translated more literally—and certainly without Waters’ artful touch—as “we see nothing there: descriptions.” The subject of Arasse’s book is the “there” in which “we see nothing”; his “descriptions” treat this zone of unintelligibility not simply as an oversight to be corrected, but as a point where painting makes contact with the conditions that allow paintings to function as representations. . . .
Review by Meghan Houser
Is it necessary that a novel be constructed to “connect” with its readers? People Park, Pasha Malla’s big, glorious mess of a debut novel, is in many ways a book-length answer this question, at once challenging and exemplifying the idea of art as a means of human connection. People Park is ultimately a monument in defense of the difficult novel . . .
Review by Matthew Spellberg
The epistolary novel is a novel’s novel, a nested box in which the conventions of prose-writing are made the explicit framework for storytelling. Mikhail Shishkin’s The Light and the Dark is a novel in letters between two lovers, a man at war, a woman at home. Their correspondence plays out beyond time and space—in China in 1900, in Russia about a century later, and in magical landscapes somewhere in between. To stake a literary novel on Love’s power to reconcile the universe to itself is not unprecedented, but it is unusual . . .
Review by Charles Shafaieh
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, Iran’s preeminent literary voice, awaits the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance’s approval for the publication of his novel, The Colonel. But if this work, edited for nearly thirty years in concealment since its genesis as a nightmare the author experienced in 1983 during the Iran-Iraq war, remains unpublished in Iran (where Dowlatabadi still lives), how does it exist in an English translation? This incongruity illuminates just one of countless paradoxes involving The Colonel . . .
Review by Jennifer Kurdyla
Rodrigo Rey Rosa has taken up the charge of carrying on the literary legacy of Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges with the idea of a world governed by coincidence and chance, and the ability of books to somehow contain and shape those experiences that are, in fact, more like dreams. Although Severina and The African Shore differ in myriad and important ways, reading them in juxtaposition presents Rey Rosa’s chameleon-like identity in high relief . . .
Review by Danny Byrne
Narrated by the cantankerous Aubrey Tearle, a retired proofreader of telephone directories with a penchant for verbosity and an evangelical mania for linguistic propriety, Ivan Vladislavić’s The Restless Supermarket is among other things a remarkably sustained act of ventriloquism . . .
Review by Nell Pach
Writers suffer, and they suffer alone, at least in the popular imagination, and quite frequently in their own imaginations as well. Moreover, they proverbially cannot abide each other’s company. “Few things are as immutable as the vindictiveness with which writers talk about their literary colleagues behind their backs,” writes W. G. Sebald in A Place in the Country, his latest posthumous publication, where he seems to accept, more or less without irony, the truth of writer-pain. A profound, ambivalent mood of separation emerges as a constant in Sebald’s analyses of the lives and creative works of his six subjects. They suffer geographic exile, they are ignored or reviled at home; not always of sound mind and body, they undergo a kind of alienation from themselves. Frequently, they walk—away, alone . . .
Review by Rose McLaren
There is a guilty enchantment about Elizabeth Price’s films. A knowing delight in the material world combined with an almost violent, if not snide, objection to materialism. At the House of Mr X takes us through the rooms of an almost ludicrously beautiful house, but the film retains something literally repulsive, it pushes us back . . .
Review by Will Heyward
Join in, be proud, cultivate yourself, and, above all, grow up: all these dreary dictates are simply confusing chores to Robert Walser. His stories in A Schoolboy's Diary never seem invented, but nor could they be real. His writing is the electricity in-between; the deflating confusion of falsely recognizing a friend in a crowd . . .
Review by Christopher Fletcher
Before you arrive in Ravicka you'll have to read Renee Gladman's novels set there: Event Factory, The Ravickians, and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge. Unlike most other works of narrative fiction, in these three novels, the meaning does not reveal itself as one reads. Instead, meaning gathers in eddies along the way, swirling around a central image or idea as the reader floats past . . .
Review by Deborah Smith
There's a deceptive simplicity to many of the pieces contained in Stalin Is Dead, this slim volume from the Israeli writer Rachel Shihor. Beneath this veneer, however, a subversive sensibility and nearly obsessive attention to detail complicate Shihor’s prose . . .
Review by Alice Whitwham
Lorine Niedecker has long been something of an enigma within American poetry. Her elusiveness lies, in part, in the tremendous economy of her poems. Her immense concision—what she calls “condensery”—can make her work feel inscrutable. In the astonishing poem, Lake Superior, Niedecker’s “condensery” is practiced with unprecedented ambition . . .
Review by Jason DeYoung
As Zach plots his “arc of motions”—its meaning, cause, consequence—we are there too. Seeing through the conspiracy and untangling the complex weave of machinations which veil the moment of these words is the plot of Cannonball, which Joseph McElroy calls “my most uneasy-feeling or darkest book” . . .
Review by Justin Alvarez
The unnamed narrator in Sergio Chejfec’s latest translated novel, The Dark, straddles these two worlds: the physical reality of his surroundings and the intangible yet boundless world of thought. For Chejfec himself, the truth, it seems, matters less than the continuous search for it . . .
Review by Caroline Bleeke
What does it mean for a novel to be true, for the truth to be novelistic? Perhaps Minae Mizumura is playing a postmodern trick on us. Regardless, in A True Novel she carves a new literary form out of the shishosetsu and honkaku shosetsu traditions, as she translates or plagiarizes or reinvents Wuthering Heights in her native tongue . . .
Review by Morten Høi Jensen
Stig Sæterbakken’s characters often rail against their confinement within themselves, entertaining thoughts of birth, death and rebirth, before they come bouncing off the walls to find that there is no escape, no respite from themselves. In Through the Night, his final and most ambitious novel, Sæterbakken dramatizes this struggle with far greater poignancy than ever before . . .
Review by Jordan Anderson
Malaparte's The Skin acts on the reader of the present day in much the same way that a vaccine does; in effect, his work introduces an element of immorality in order to ultimately protect the reader against its effects . . .
Review by Thomas Patrick Wisniewski
What’s surprising isn’t a lack of unity between the tales in Jonathan Littell's The Fata Morgana Books, as one might expect, but rather a kind of bland uniformity of voice and point of view...
Review by Rose McLaren
Though powerfully written and often illuminating, Jacques Rancière’s analysis is at times overbearing and frequently skewed by his own dogma. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Béla Tarr: The Time After reads best where he strays from his theorizing, distracted in a study of the films for their own sakes...
Review by Michael Bryson
Douglas Glover’s stories in Savage Love enter mystery early and never leave. Readers are drawn along for the journey on slipstreams of luminescent prose...
