Review by Ariel Starling
Yasushi Inoue did not make his debut in literature until 1949 at the age of forty-two. He did so with the two short novels Bullfight and The Hunting Gun; the former won him the prestigious Akutagawa Prize—the Japanese equivalent of the Pulitzer—and he went on to write over fifty novels and win every major Japanese literary prize. It seems safe to say that Inoue was worth the wait. Despite occupying the upper echelons of postwar writers in Japan, he has not yet achieved the western readership of his Nobel-Prize-winning contemporaries Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima. The matter may best be chalked up to the fact that literary renown, particularly for literature in translation, is a strange beast. Whatever the cause, it has nothing to do with Inoue's caliber as a writer . . .
Review by Will Heyward
Gerald Murnane's A Million Windows is organized into a series of fragments, many of which describe an image or a succession of connected images. Interspersed with these images are discussions of different aspects of the craft of writing fiction, with the narrator complaining about how a particular book that he once admired has come to disappoint him. These images, memories, and discussions never progress, at least not in the way a story does; instead they intersect obliquely, carrying traces and hints of desire, longing, regret, apprehension, and misunderstanding whose painfulness or meaning is not always immediately clear . . .
Review by Tynan Kogane
Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Mad and the Bad is an entirely profane nightmare, which only flirts with moral or ideological messages, throwing them out in offhand ways, so as not to distract too much from the thrill of the ride. And what a ride! The day after beginning her new job as a nursemaid, both Julie and Peter are kidnapped and flung into an elaborate plot, which begins to spiral out of control as the unlikely pair are pursued across France by a sickly hired assassin named Thompson and a couple of his cronies. Thompson is an exemplary hard-boiled character, who embodies many of the genre’s ideals, but he’s tired and washed up, as though these ideals have decayed inside of him, hollowing him into a saggy balloon-like caricature of the typical hard-boiled hero . . .
Review by Anne K. Yoder
What became of this person, this life? How can he be here one minute, and then gone forever the next? Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s first novel, Fra Keeler, begins with this endpoint in mind. Fra Keeler has died, and the unnamed narrator moves into his house to become the self-appointed investigator of Fra Keeler’s death . . .
Review by Emmanuel Iduma
Ingrid Winterbach's The Elusive Moth is an exploration of a strange kind: each inch covered is more or less a marathon. Winterbach’s writing reads as a deliberately paced uncovering of broken things and lives within a ruptured space . . .
Review by Andrew Marzoni
For better or worse, the energy and desire for political change—radical political change—is more often than not left in the hands of those without the wisdom, experience, and understanding to effect it: the young. This Catch-22 of revolutionary fervor is a phenomenon that Czech writer Jáchym Topol understands well. One of the most prominent journalistic voices of 1989’s Velvet Revolution, Topol is now a widely respected novelist, heir to a literary culture whose giants—Václav Havel, Milan Kundera––are as well known for their political activity as for their creative output. Unsurprising for a novelist brought up within the Eastern Bloc, Topol’s novels are primarily concerned with history, and in Nightwork—his fourth novel, first published in 2001 but just recently made available in English––he turns to the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, commonly referred to as Prague Spring . . .
Review by Mieke Chew
“The most important writer of the decade” were the words used to describe Hermann Ungar in 1927. This was no small praise for a contemporary of Döblin, Kafka, and Musil. But less than a century later, Ungar has been all but forgotten. The Second World War has played no small role here. Ungar's books, too, were controversial. The critics couldn’t stomach Ungar’s indecent scenarios. Rather than pan the book, they ignored it completely. Ungar died young and found new enemies in death. Max Brod and Willy Haas were not men to cross in the 1930s world of letters; it seems that they worked to make this singular writer forgotten. It would appear that they succeeded. Ungar was as virtually unknown in his lifetime as he is today. Somehow his books remain in print and English translations are readily available. This is our great fortune; nearly a century later, Ungar’s beautiful, clear prose, and shocking, comic narratives remain every bit as vital and original . . .
Review by Patrick Nathan
The extraordinary popularity of Gabriel García Márquez and Roberto Bolaño has spawned translations of other Spanish-language writers, whose books, it turns out, aren’t so easy to dismiss as ornaments of “the other.” Instead they position themselves, sometimes aggressively, in the real world. In Mairal’s The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra—as in many other novels of this new generation—art has replaced magic as the immense, central presence. It’s become the thing we can’t ignore . . .
Review by David Winters
Joseph Cornell’s air of mystery has attracted many literary admirers, and Gabriel Josipovici appears well-acquainted with these precursors. It is partly thanks to their inspiration that he has now created his own Cornellian novel, named after a box filled with stars and scraps of paper: Hotel Andromeda. Josipovici is a writer who prizes “lightness,” and his airborne prose never tethers or traps Cornell’s art; never encases it in the amber of comprehension. Rather, his narrative subtly circles around its subject, tracing the outlines of a shape which remains “untouchable, unknowable” . . .
Review by P.T. Smith
At its core, Leg Over Leg is a travelogue. The protagonist is the Fariyāq—the name a portmanteau of Faris al-Shidyāq—who moves from Lebanon, to Malta, to England, to Paris, and makes various stops along points in between. Along the way he makes friends and enemies, joins and leaves a monastery or two, works varied jobs as translator, dream interpreter, general scholar, marries, and has a family. And the book itself travels, has its own sense of motion. Though there is a sexual innuendo in the title Leg Over Leg—legs entwined, either in action or in the post-coital jumble of comfort—it also calls to mind a sashaying one foot in front of the other, traveling confidently, with style, across themes, obsessions, affections . . .
Review by Justin Beplate
“It is a nightmare,” Prentice wrote to Beckett three days after receiving the story, “‘Echo’s Bones’ would, I am sure, lose the book a great many readers. People will shudder and be puzzled and confused; and they won’t be keen on analyzing the shudder.” Prentice’s verdict came as a demoralizing blow for Beckett. He confided to MacGreevy that his rejection of a story “into which I put all I knew and plenty that I was better still aware of, discouraged me profoundly,” but when More Pricks Than Kicks finally appeared in the spring of 1934, sales were so disappointing that it is hard to see how anything, even the nightmarish farrago of “Echo’s Bones,” could have depressed them any further. Even today, with Beckett’s reputation secure and a reading public accustomed to the high jinks of postmodernist literature, this story presents formidable challenges . . .
Review by Danny Byrne
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s now-infamous six-volume memoir, of which the third volume has now been published in English, is the monument to his personal struggle with this set of Proustian problematics. Readers of volume one may recall that Knausgaard’s autobiographic odyssey was prompted by his own madeleine moment. In describing his memories in terms that are primarily denotative, Knausgaard invites us to reimagine them for ourselves, to imaginatively infuse the text with our own specificity, making the process of reading My Struggle a kind of collective exercise in remembering . . .
Review by Scott Esposito
In What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, her latest book, Tillman is again jamming together various writing genres and models of realism to produce essays that feel immediate and personal. Their common strength is that they retain the heat of her encounters with art . . .
Review by Jordan Anderson
Ágota Kristóf’s writing is marked by a sense of upheaval and sparseness that she endured for much of her life as an exile of both country and of language. Cementing her identity as an outsider, Kristóf would earn success in both her adopted homeland and her adopted tongue, publishing her first novel The Notebook after years of small-scale writing. The discipline Kristóf developed on the hard road to stability is everywhere evident both in the refinement of the author's short, elegant sentences and the caustic realism with which she describes the human condition. Her prose and her characters are as hard and precise as steel . . .
Review by Jennifer Kurdyla
A fated, yet strangely willed, union between young girls, tinged with a biting antagonism, lights the fire that burns throughout Amanda Michalopoulou’s new novel, Why I Killed My Best Friend. The provocative title suggests that its protagonist and narrator, Maria, is not so much inspired as she is continually challenged and imposed upon by the person who is her childhood classmate and the eponymous best friend, Anna. Indeed, the way Anna dictates and directs Maria’s every thought, romantic interest, political ideology, place of residence, and entire sense of self makes the novel an acutely accurate portrayal of female friendship, as well as of our innately human desire to cling to those who elicit the parts of ourselves we’d rather keep locked up in the dark . . .
Review by Zach Maher
Compared to most day jobs, my own included, being forced to read a novel, and being obligated to attempt to understand what its author is doing or saying, are heavenly assignments. That’s how I, at the outset, so eagerly looked forward to reviewing Alain Robbe-Grillet's A Sentimental Novel. It’s also why I was in the end jolted by something so clichéd, and poetically justified, as a rude awakening . . .
Review by Madeleine LaRue
"Writing in a small language, from a literary out-of-nation zone, now that is not a profession—that is a diagnosis." Europe in Sepia, Dubravka Ugrešić’s latest book to appear in English, is a diagnosis, too. The twenty-three essays in the collection investigate various forms of crisis, becoming a catalog of the madnesses, ironies, and tragedies of the global age . . .
Review by Adam Z. Levy
Hilda Hilst’s With My Dog-Eyes and Letters from a Seducer are feats of economy and compression, yet they are expansive in the way Beckett is expansive, stripped of all but the bare and brutal questions of human experience. Her “pornographic” books are united by the violence with which she works to undo the grammar of systems of confinement—language, gender, sexuality, and form—and the tenderness and comedy with which she scours the bleakness of circumstance for something that an optimist might call hope . . .
Review by Jeffrey Zuckerman
If Lagos in Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief is a real-life analogue of Hades, where “life hangs out” instead of happening, and we are to imagine this book as its narrator’s trip to the underworld, then what do the dead remember? Not much, apparently. Consequently, the book’s photographs and writing serve as ways of anchoring the past, of creating something solid on insubstantial ground . . .
Review by Kayla Blatchley
Roughly ninety-three of the 124 stories in Lydia Davis’s new collection of stories Can’t and Won’t are written in the first person. I counted because I had an inkling, on first read, that the new feeling of openness in these stories might have to do with how many of them were written in the first person . . .
