Reviewed by Andrea Scrima
Fox is subtle, virtuosic, and jarring; it’s also mordantly funny. In light-footed, deceptively playful detours and digressions, the book skips from Stalinist Russia to an American road trip with the Nabokovs, academic conferences and literary festivals to the largely untold story of the Far-East diaspora of persecuted Russian intellectuals on the eve of World War II. Fox is a novel, but its formal structure poses a challenge; some chapters read as essays, some as autonomous short stories, and while many recurrent threads reveal themselves upon closer inspection and reflection, unraveling the author’s narrative strategy takes time and attention.
Reviewed by Hal Hlavinka
In his home country, Dag Solstad is an inescapable literary figure. His extraordinary and diverse output suggests a peripatetic mind ever searching for modernism’s golden calf: the New. Here in the States, one of our very own Saints of the New, Lydia Davis, taught herself Norwegian by reading Solstad’s infamous Telemark novel in the original. “Do exactly what you want,” she has said of his demanding style: “the drama exists in his voice.” But for most of us American readers, who rely on gifted translators to do all the heavy lifting, and who have had to be satisfied with the 2015 rendering of Shyness and Dignity or hunt down UK editions of Novel 11, Book 18, and Professor Andersen’s Night, the majority of his work remains hidden. Happily enough, this year brings a comparative glut of Solstad novels, as a pair of the author’s late works, T Singer and Armand V, have arrived in English—in lucid, agile translations courtesy of Tiina Nunnaly and Steven T. Murray, respectively—to reintroduce readers to the Norwegian giant’s dry wit and protean style…
Reviewed by Chad Felix
Deep within My German Brother, Chico Buarque’s rich and inventive new novel, the narrator Ciccio, the youngest son of a respected literary family, announces that he’s “almost beginning to believe the things [he] made up.” The statement’s directness underscores its starkness: because his older (Brazilian) brother is gone, their mother is grieving by constructing a world in which her eldest child is still alive, “now drinking hot chocolate in the Café Tortoni, now strolling trough Plaza San Martín, now greeting a blind poet on Calle Maipú.” Ciccio plays along, making things up in an effort to soften the blow, half-believing . . .
Reviewed by Darren Huang
Sergio Chejfec has written a number of erudite, highly idiosyncratic, and densely philosophical works, either in the form of novels or novel-based visual art, that follow peripatetic narrators in their meditations on artistic creation, memory, and landscape. Baroni: A Journey, his most recent book translated into English, is a modern interpretation of the flâneur novel. The result is a stylistic tour de force, a rigorous exploration of the border between art and life, and an intimate chronicle of a man’s intellectual and spiritual engagement with an artist and her work…
Reviewed by Sophie Pinkham
“Sudbina,” the new album by American vocalist Eva Salina and Serbian-Romanian Romani accordionist Peter Stan, opens with the lines, Let me live, let me love. Salina’s wistful delivery leaves little doubt that hers is a hopeless plea. The singer’s fate is cruel; she can only watch the happiness of others. Stan’s accordion keens along with Salina, a trusted confidant alone in the room with her. At the end of the song, Stan cuts off the air to his instrument, leaving only the voiceless clacking of the keys.
Reviewed by Timothy Aubry
…let’s get back to Murnane’s strangeness for a minute, because his fiction is so very, so intricately strange and one benefit of his refusal of realist protocols is that he can make it just as strange as he likes, thereby expanding our sense of and our admiration for the possible—the one thing, he notes, that the “actual” can never be.
Reviewed by Sam Carter
Because any attempt at exculpation ultimately evaporates when forced to face the facts, what remains in The Desert and Its Seed is an excavation, a brushing away instead of a brushing off that seeks to uncover what Jorge Baron Biza once called “the difference between the exterior appearance of a tragedy and its interior view...”
Reviewed by Andrew Lapin
The artist and his medium were locked in a decades-long dance of death. While still in high school, having already weathered surgery for clubfoot, Joe Frank developed testicular cancer and had to undergo painful cobalt radiation treatments. He would spend the rest of his life in and out of treatment for various severe medical ailments, including bladder cancer. He also endured a kidney transplant. Long spells of medically and chemically induced quarantine provided Frank with ample time to ponder the alienation he felt from the world of the living, and ultimately translate much of that uncertainty into groundbreaking radio fictions.
Reviewed by Nick Oxford
The Chandelier amplifies the lonely interior monologues and infighting that had been the hallmark of Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart. At the same time, it challenges the reader even more than any of Lispector’s earlier texts: the novel becomes a proving ground, where the only way to succeed is to persevere through the long sentences and blurred boundaries between Virginia’s life and her contemplation thereof...
Reviewed by Tyler Langendorfer
Though largely a conservative society, Wilhelmine Germany was nonetheless home to some of the most progressive and pioneering thinkers of its time. The pronounced militarism and censorship embodied by Kaiser Wilhelm II were counteracted by early human-rights activism and experimental, anti-reactionary art. Yet fiction and non-fiction from this period, in particular from exponents representing the liberal side of these conflicting forces, have remained largely unknown to Anglophone readers. Seeking to rectify this problem, the Berlin-based publisher Rixdorf Editions, in two authoritative translations by James Conway, has now released two texts never before available in English: The Guesthouse at the Sign of the Teetering Globe (1917) by Franziska (Fanny) zu Reventlow, a short story collection; and Berlin’s Third Sex (1904) by Magnus Hirschfeld, which according to Conway is “arguably the first truly serious, sympathetic study of the gay and lesbian experience ever written.”
Reviewed by David O'Meara
His enthusiasts know the biography. Born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Minsk, Poland, in 1923, Levine was raised in Ottawa's district of Lower Town—occupied then by mostly French and Irish Catholics—before being sent to England as a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. Returning to Canada, he attended McGill University and published two poetry collections before his first novel, The Angled Road (1952) and a memoir, Canada Made Me in 1958 (“My writing begins with that book,” Levine would write). For some critics, this book is considered the main reason for Levine’s neglect in Canadian letters. Written as a three-month journey across the country, Levine’s recollections and portraits are less than flattering, depicting a gritty, desolate, working-class panorama of mid-century Canada. He writes: “No one is really a stranger in Canada if he was brought up in a small town. They remain so much the same across the country: a vast repetition, not only of the Main Street, the side-streets, the railway track, the river; but the same dullness and boredom."
Reviewed by Jan Steyn
The table of contents announces seven chapters (the numbers are mine): 1) Dragonese, 2) D̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ Do Translations, 3) And Still No Rain / Roland Barthes Rhymes with, 4) Amateur Translator, 5) Maker of Wholes (Let’s Say of a Table), 6) Who Refuses To Let Go of Her Translations Until She Feels She Has Written the Books Herself (Or, Translation and the Principle of Tact).
I am interested in tables, so I turn to the fifth chapter and start skimming. It begins with the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand in Paris (the one with the four right-angled towers facing in on each other like open books and the “sunken forest garden” in its center). It ends with a plea to recognize the singularity of every translation. Ah, I think, she is here also “actively parrying against the all purpose explanation.”
And so: Kate Brigg’s book, This Little Art, is about translation, dragons, and tables. It argues for singularity and against all-purpose explanations. It applies the methods of genre-bending song and active parrying to evidence from Roland Barthes and the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand…
Reviewed by Jennifer Croft
Ann Quin’s The Unmapped Country may be part of a larger resurgence. Jennifer Hodgson’s curation shapes these short stories and autobiographical sketches and the unfinished Unmapped Country itself into a chronicle of someone slowly running out of steam. What is feisty, even cocky at the start will fade into exhaustion; experiments seem to yield few findings, and the attempt to understand what underlies the daily misunderstandings of modern life is frustrated and stops short in an incomprehension that comes to feel absolute...
Reviewed by Halley Parrey
Hermione Hoby’s aptly named debut novel Neon in Daylight examines the roles we assign ourselves to play and how our performances are received or simply ignored. Under Hoby’s purview, we do not fare much better at communicating than neon signs. We perform—we flare, we fizzle out—hoping to illuminate the darkness, which we achieve slightly, clumsily, if at all.
Reviewed by Irina Denischenko
As in his earlier works, Krasznahorkai’s narrators in The World Goes On find themselves wandering in a world of forgotten revelations and corrupted messages, blindly groping toward ineffable essences that forever remain out of reach. As the reader eavesdrops on their minds caught up in obsessive thought patterns, s/he witnesses consciousness on the threshold of insight. By recasting themes familiar from his novels in short story form, Krasznahorkai condenses fragmented revelations, increasing their potency, and creates a sense of wholeness that short story collections often lack. The World Goes On is a labyrinth of parallel universes that echo and correspond to one another, creating, with each new story, a déjà vu like effect that renders the reader’s escape into linear clarity nearly impossible. Moreover, the broad scope of this collection clarifies the various links between Krasznahorkai’s recurrent themes and the importance of his stylistic innovations, such as his unending sentences and estranged narrative positions that dissolve the boundaries of narrative voices...
Reviewed by Patrick Nathan
Through fourteen essays about fourteen films, Scott Esposito celebrates cinema’s power. After watching Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time, wherein the earth’s and its universe’s respective lifespans are shown to be finite, Esposito posits that “What makes us human are the questions that are irresolvable. Our humanity will cease once we learn to render them irrelevant. And yet we strive to do just that.” Indeed, bracketing The Doubles as he does, beginning with Errol Morris’s A Brief History of Time and ending with Malick’s Voyage, Esposito establishes science’s paradoxical ability to at once shatter and deepen our collective mysteries. “Science stands opposite mystery,” he writes, “it wants answers that do not allow further mysteries”...
Reviewed by Craig Epplin
If our bones will betray us, if they can betray us, it is because they have stories to tell. Like the rings of a tree, our bones have secrets to share with those who know how to listen. And in fact, much of the plot of The Iliac Crest turns on a secret. “I know you are a woman,” the houseguest breathes into the narrator’s ear one evening. The doctor does not immediately react, but the revelation of the secret, the dramatic display of the power inherent in its possession, interrupts his internal world and sense of self.
Reviewed by Gary Michael Perry
When reading The Illustrious House of Ramires, it is difficult not to imagine the sound of pen scratching at paper. Barely a character appears who is not, in some way, engaged in the act of writing. From Father Soeiro’s history of the cathedral at Oliveira and Tonio’s compendium of scandals committed by Portugal’s oldest families to the novella whose composition sits at the novel’s centre, its content largely drawn from an epic Romantic poem by the protagonist’s Uncle Duarte, The Illustrious House is crammed to bursting with aspiring writers. Aggrieved letters are sent to the newspapers, archives sifted through, periodicals founded, the full spectrum of literate and literary nineteenth century life laid out before the reader.
Reviewed by Hannah LeClair
As a writer, Elise Levine has an affinity for the tightly compressed, and so her novel Blue Field revolves around the exploration of torturously claustrophobic underwater spaces through the risky, physically and mentally challenging practice of “crunch diving.” In the novel, Levine sends her protagonist, Marilyn, into the depths of cenotes, where submarine rivers stream from limestone caverns, and the flooded galleys of shipwrecks. Levine describes these dives in writing that is accordingly elegant and compact. Reading the novel is a sensation akin to drifting weightlessly beneath the surface of the text—”the underside of waves a shimmering twill,” in Levine’s words. In her hands, this description becomes an apt metaphor for her prose: dazzling, textured, tightly woven. Such elegance is the result of careful and unremitting practice. Levine, a transplant to Baltimore from her native Toronto, is an exacting writer whose two other books are a testament to her drive for precision: a 2003 novel entitled Requests and Dedications, and the acclaimed 1995 collection, Driving Men Mad, in which her short stories unfolded across sometimes as few as three or four pages in dense, highly controlled language...
Reviewed by Sara Nović
I picked up Daša Drndić’s Belladonna a few weeks before neo-Nazi rallies swept through the United States, the latest show of force by the burgeoning “Alt-Right” and white supremacist movement. The real world had left me on edge. And as with any Croatian or ex-Yugoslavian literature, I expected an emotional read—no matter the subject matter, Balkan novels often find me awash in nostalgia for one of the places I call home, or stung with grief when they lay bare the wars of the ‘90s. It will come as no surprise for those familiar with her work that Drndić’s latest does both. What I hadn’t expected, though, was the ways in which Belladonna would speak to me, and all of us, as Americans—warning us, precisely encapsulating for us the ugly truth of the political moment in which we are struggling...