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 . . .
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 . . .
