Review by Alexandra Primiani
It starts with a description of the thing: what it does, how we relate to it, how we describe it. The heart of Simon Limbres—the character who will lose his life—is more than just the tissue and blood and valves that make it up, but a kind of catalyst for the life he has led until this day. The Heart, Maylis de Kerangal’s eighth book in French and her third to be translated into English, drops its readers into the life of Simon Limbres and documents the reverberations of his death felt within his family, community and through France...
Review by Angus McPherson
Although electronic music and blends of acoustic and electronic sound were an important part of Saariaho’s palette in the earlier stages of her career, both these discs feature only acoustic works. The virtuosic manipulation of color in these works, however, demonstrates that the haunting sense of transcendence for which Saariaho’s music is known is by no means limited to her work with electronics.
Review by Stephen Henighan
José Eduardo Agualusa surpasses in English-language renown Angolan writers who, in Portuguese, are more popular than he (Pepetela and often Ondjaki) and/or more highly regarded in literary terms (Luandino Vieira, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho). Yet the vision of Angolan history transmitted by Agualusa’s fiction differs from that of writers from MPLA backgrounds less than his dissent might lead a reader to expect.
Review by Kevin Laskey
The rock critic Lester Bangs dreamed of having a basement filled with every album of music ever made. This idea makes more sense from a collector’s perspective than a listener’s—the sense of completion is what’s important here, rather than the practical ability to actually enjoy that immense amount of media. Choosing one object out of so many can be psychologically incapacitating, hence the store layout of Trader Joe’s and the design of a Chipotle’s menu—and, from a musical standpoint, Igor Stravinsky’s thought that “the more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self.” If one wants to discover new music, just having it available in one’s basement (or computer or phone or local library) isn’t enough. There has be a “Lester Bangs Decimal System” to help you find the music you weren’t necessarily looking for, something that replaces the old experience of thumbing through used LPs at a record store, where it was possible to make intuitive choices based on album art or the supporting players on a session.
Review by Paul Griffiths
In Nanjing it is raining. On Jiuhuashan, the holy mountain whose temples equal in number the days of the year, dense fog descends. In Zhenjiang the hotel is closed. The Shanghai commercial district of Pudong is all brash modernity. In Hangzhou it is raining. The annoyances of travel are everywhere in László Krasznahorkai’s Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens (Seagull, 2016), but they are merely incidental to the central frustration of his quest, conducted over months spent in regions around Shanghai, to see if the classical culture of China might still be found living, and being lived . . .
Review by Hal Hlavinka
Is there any room for, dare we say, a little fun? Lo, the work of Jeremy M. Davies arrives, gags and ball gag both in hand, to fidget and fuss with our pat distinctions. For Davies, the game is quite seriously not that serious. In “The Pleasure of Perversity,” an essay that appeared in 2015, Davies ponders the specifics of his literary project: “My commitment is, I think, to surprise. Surprise and pleasure. Surprise and pleasure and form. (Homoousios.) I’m too lazy to be ashamed of this.” The purpose of writing, as I understand from Davies’s holy trinity, is the crafting of forms that best carry, from writer to reader, this surprise and pleasure. Form is then a tool, like a basket or a gun, constructed to deliver these affective effects. “My investment is in pleasure,” he writes. “The pleasure of the reader, the pleasure of the artificer, and how/why that pleasure can be arranged or delayed, prolonged or ‘weaponized.’” One gets the sense that what’s at stake is nothing less serious than a joke (that old “weaponizer” of language and logic); that the tension of form is the same tension we feel in the buildup to a punch line, ever-delayed; that we’re all in on it, and it’s just a matter of time before this pesky rug gets pulled out. Because Davies's Fancy and The Knack of Doing, in the end, is damned funny . . .
Review by Scott Esposito
Rafael Chirbes's On the Edge proved to be a chaotic, misanthropic opus from a literary heavyweight. Published earlier this year in a polished English translation by veteran Margaret Jull Costa, it is a book that demands attention. It is a major statement about contemporary Spain, one that is almost unbearably cynical and bitter, at times less a literary novel so much as a catalog of indignities, regrets, wrongdoing, decay, and general human awfulness. It is a book that offers the reader no hope, a book that may very well suggest that hope itself is an emotion that is simply naive in a Spain that has been crushed by malaiseand taken captive by oligarchs . . .
Review by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Krauze’s unistic style of music closely followed Strzemiński’s manner of painting: flat on its surface, although potentially deeply layered. Where Strzemiński avoided a hierarchy of foreground and background, so Krauze avoids incident or drama in his music. Just as every part of a Strzemiński canvas is equal to every other, so every element of a Krauze work can be heard, in theory, in its first few seconds; and every subsequent moment continues to present all of those elements. Throughout the work’s duration essentially nothing new happens. However, that does not necessarily make it dull . . .
Review by Xenia Hanusiak
The responsibility for guiding audiences in the act of listening to classical music has historically rested on the shoulders of composers. In the United States, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thompson, and John Cage each brought a prolific pen to the discussion. In Europe, Pierre Boulez and more recently Heiner Goebbels have both asked us to reconsider the relationship between music and the audience. The baton of inquiry is now passing to contemporary visual artists. Two recent shows in New York have questioned the assumptions on which the act of listening seems to be founded. . .
Review by Lauren Goldenberg
Idra Novey's Ways to Disappear is a beckoning mix of comedy and noir, romance and violence. Perhaps above all else, it is a love letter to the art of translation. That most particular, intimate act is threaded throughout, and the question arises again and again: how do you know a person? Through words, or through blood? And aren’t relationships between people translations themselves, in a sense?
Review by Matthew Lorenzon
. . . Taking his cue from the novel’s binary of earth and air, each chord is mirrored by another, inversionally-symmetrical chord (that is, one that has been “flipped” vertically). Read from right to left, the grid’s pitch profile moves from the highest registers of the ensemble to the lowest, just as the characters move from halcyon Australia to the earthy mud of the battlefield. My immediate impression when hearing that Gyger had used a “landscape-like grid of pitches” was a slight internal groan. Representing the (generally flat) Australian landscape is a cliché of Australian composition. Seeing the grid, however, I understood that Gyger’s landscape is less a panorama than a bird’s-eye view of the world as Jim sees when he is taken up in a light aircraft. The grid may also resemble a battlefield with the inversionally-symmetrical chords forming opposing networks of mine holes and trenches
Review by Daniel Hartley
The stories in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond feature a consistent narratorial voice: a female first-person narrator who recounts past events, hypothetical situations, and self-discoveries to an implied interlocutor. A young Englishwoman living in rural Ireland (or so we infer), the narrator is unreliable to the extent that she is often unsure as to what took place in the past, what her motivation was, or why she is even recounting this in the present. She is generally as much as of a mystery to herself as to the reader; indeed, the narrative motor of these stories is less plot than the narrator’s attempt to fathom why she did or did not do something, or what exactly the truth might be behind a particular trait she has remarked about herself . . .
Review by Will Rees
“We should be punished for thinking we can control everything, even death,” writes Portuguese journalist Susana Moreira Marques in her slim new volume Now and at the Hour of Our Death. Indeed, often we are. How can we prepare ourselves “for death and dying” while avoiding this fantasy of control which may simply serve to increase the height from which we fall? Moreira Marques’s book—translated into sharp, spare English by Julia Sanches—provides more than a few clues. Systematically rejecting every rhetorical and psychological trick we typically use to make light of death or gain a foothold in it, Moreira Marques nonetheless avoids stumbling blindly into pessimism. By turning a journalist’s unblinking eye to the concrete realities of dying, she allows something fragile, utterly realistic and quietly affirming to come to the fore . . .
Review by Daniela Cascella
This is a tale of transmission, disappearance, and utterance, of writing as it hovers at the edge of language, trafficking with the ephemeral and the unreliable; challenging the primacy of the written text through a compelling reflection on flow and interference, rhythms and non-origin. A tale of listening as the rebeginning of writing; of people missing but resounding through words whose meaning is lost (or maybe it was never there completely): it has to be made anew every time. A story of speech emerged from and given back to birds, wind and water, a story of speech into landscape. A tale of writing as divining and impure continuity.
Review by Liam Cagney
Tanguy Viel’s libretto for Les Pigeons d’argile transposes the tale to France in the past five or six years, with Hearst restyled as the French Patricia Baer (soprano Vannina Santoni). A love story takes central place: the relationship between terrorists Charlie (baritone Aimery Lefèvre) and Toni becomes threatened when Toni falls for the kidnapped Patty. Minor characters feature: Patty’s father Bernard Baer (bass-baritone Vincent Le Texier), a business magnate; Toni’s father Pietro (tenor Gilles Ragon), an aged socialist and caretaker of the Baer estate; and a police chief (mezzo Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo). That the Patty Hearst episode is transposed to France—site of the Revolutionary Republic, the Terror, the Paris Commune, the lost revolution of May ’68, and (now) the recent Islamic State terror attacks—is deliberately provocative. . .
Review by Nell Pach
No one’s ever really gone on the Internet. “With all this technology, absence has become a lie,” writes Hisham Bustani in The Perception of Meaning. Absent presence—that paradox of electronic communication—slowly emerges as a central motif in this enigmatic and yet wonderfully immersive novel...
Review by Jeremy M. Davies
When Dodge Rose first landed at my desk at Dalkey Archive Press, I thought it was a hoax. A trap. I showed it to my assistant editor of the time and he agreed: novels like Dodge Rose don’t come into one’s life in brown paper, humble, untrumpeted. It wasn’t possible, we said, that a young, Australian Beckett with virtually no publications to his name had just dropped in our laps. No, there was some sinister plot in the works. A plot to—well, what? Was this some éminence grise of the mainstream cutting loose and producing the high-modernist novel he or she had been lusting to write since their teenage infatuation with Ulysses? Or could this be one of Dalkey’s own authors—or employees?—submitting a novel under a false name to see if we would be able to sniff out the imposture? It even occurred to me to worry that Dodge Rose was, Ern Malley-wise, a prank, an attempt to snare a small press known for publishing “subversive” fiction into signing on a book written expressly to parody said fiction. There had to be a catch, no?
Review by Joshua Daniel Edwin
Although i mean i dislike that fate that i was made to where is Sophie Seita’s English translation of Uljana Wolf’s German poetry, this simple binary does justice to neither side of what it describes. Both texts, the original and the translation, are inter-lingual. They rely on linguistic multiplicity: they work in it; they are made of it . . .
Review by Bruno George
Berit Ellingsen's Not Dark Yet is ultimately a Robinsonade, its Crusoe, Brandon, willingly isolated in a cabin in the woods. Even the novel’s first line expresses harkens back to Crusoe the world-traveler: “Sometimes, in Brandon Minamoto’s dreams, he found a globe or a map of the world with a continent he hadn’t seen before.” But unlike Crusoe, Brandon doesn’t save himself and his isolate world through deep-sea salvaging and strict accounting. Standing before his cabin for the very first time, Brandon has a yielding, melting, anonymous experience that sharply separates him from Defoe’s energetic and autonomous Crusoe: “He closed his eyes and there was no body, and no world either, only the simple, singular nothingness he recognized as himself” . . .
Review by Anna Zalokostas
“How long does a thought take to form?” asks a woman in Vertigo, a collection of linked stories by British writer and illustrator Joanna Walsh. “Years sometimes. But how long to think it? And once thought it’s impossible to go back. How long does it take to cross an hour?” Sometimes it takes hours to finish a sentence, a lifetime to find a city from which it becomes possible to begin. Time in Vertigo doesn’t so much slow down as it does short-circuit; the present moment is suspended, each instant expanded. Stories pass by like slow motion film; long stretches of thought are torqued by the white noise of the ordinary. This is a liminal space that eludes situation, an amplified present that expands the possibilities of genre . . .
