Reviewed by Nathan Knapp
This novel, Aphasia, mentions—and mentions is a very weak verb, better would be alludes, though alludes also fails, so instead we’ll say references, which points us in the right direction but also falls short, we suppose we will have to proceed anyway, knowing the reader gets the general idea—W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, Robert Walser, Conjunctions, Arvo Pärt, Olivier Messiaen, Richard Greaves, Helen Schulman, László Krasznahorkai, Thomas Bernhard’s Correction, Anton Chekhov’s Gooseberries, Mary Gaitskill, Grace Paley, Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, Adam Haslett, Stanley Elkin, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, The Silence by Ingmar Bergman, Michael Silverblatt, Bill Viola, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew by Dr. Seuss, others that I have missed, perhaps others that are not named but are alluded to, even if only stylistically, perhaps, like James Joyce’s Ulysses . . .
Reviewed by Nathan Knapp
This novel is a refreshing burst of madness, a flood of lunacy in a literary culture generally interested in its opposite: sanity, so-called. In the end—lest I overemphasize this one aspect of the book over all the others—it’s also a moving meditation on fatherhood, sonhood, and both what it means to be a family, and be a part of one. Despite its surface anachronisms, it’s here that the book leans toward the timeless, filled with startling wisdoms: “We begin to see the virtues of our birth fathers only after the fathers we thought would replace them have disappointed us in turn. By then of course it is too late.” And “it is because she loves [her father] so much . . . that as long as they live a friendly word will never pass between them.” And “at bottom there was between us a mutual substrate of mutual loathing that safeguarded for each of us the autonomy and actuality of the other.” I could go on quoting. In fact, it would likely be better if this review were relieved entirely of my words and simply filled with quotes from Sachs’s excellent book. The muscular delicacy of his achievement—with its subtle and complex treatment of familial love, familial hostility, familial pain, both shared and unknowingly-shared—cannot be overstated. I hope it will find the recognition it deserves.
Reviewed by Nathan Knapp
There is something of Paul Celan in The People’s Field, the debut poetry collection from Haesong Kwon, a wound inherent to the poetry which the poetry itself serves to both obscure and illuminate. I kept thinking of Celan as I read these poems, a few of which I first heard Kwon read aloud five or six years ago when we were both living in a windy, heat-drenched, and shoddy town on the plains of northern Oklahoma. Every word in Kwon’s work, as in Celan’s, stands in for a vast and abyssal longing for home, aching with a kind of self-negating fullness—or a self-filling emptiness—corresponding with a dizzying array of flavors and aromas: mudfish, dried fish, monkfish, shrimp crackers, field onions (“Some let you rot / for gravid fish”). . .
