Overseas, Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest novel has carried her to fresh levels of acclaim. She’s won not only the Thomas Mann Prize, in her native Germany, but also Italy’s Strega Europeo, something of a Booker for the Continent. Now the book is out in this country, under the title Go, Went, Gone, and though Erpenbeck’s four previous have won critical esteem—the New York Review of Books deemed her last novel “ferocious as well as virtuosic”—here, too, the new work could well generate broader recognition.
The work of Swedish fiction writer Karin Tidbeck compels reading for several reasons, not least the intriguing things she does with names. Her first novel in English, termed “speculative fiction” in its publicity materials, sets off speculation with the name of the protagonist alone: Brilars’ Vanja Essre Two. Granted, most of the time this young woman is referred to simply as “Vanja.” Still, everyone around her turns out to wear a likewise complicated coat of arms.
Just when you’re about to do a proper job as critic, assessing Jeff VanderMeer’s latest and looking at his previous, considering, too, his worldwide success and the good it’s done for science fiction generally—just when you’re about to get serious, his new novel, Borne, hits you with the likes of this:
In Naples, two men meet for lunch. They squeeze into a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria, above a steep and narrow alley—the sort of space that still defines the old centro—where one declares: “Tell me how anyone can doubt the existence of God after eating a margherita pizza.”
About halfway into Amber Sparks’s new collection of stories, a “feral” girl cursed by a witch, hiding out in a “wild, ancient wood,” receives an extraordinary visitor. A man “all black hair and sharp lines” drives up in a car that befits him, “sleek and modern.” The girl marvels: “It looked like an industrial beast fleeing unthinkable places, the new cowering from the oldest things in the world.” The sheer weirdness of the arrival fetches a grin, and whips the narrative around like a sling, taking it from a disturbed fairy tale to a feminist Game of Thrones. The turnabout,
The very title of this novel announces a departure for Matt Bell. Scrapper—with its homely brevity and flat vowels—stands in striking contrast to the Biblical roll of Bell’s 2013 In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods. So too, more substantial elements in the new book reveal that its young author is going for something different. The house and lake of the previous novel had no fixed address, unfolding in a nightmare. But Scrapper at once places us in contemporary Detroit, “fifty years an American wreck.” A handful of chapters visit elsewhere, but the stay is
Reviewing is easy, but history can be hard. I mean that Michael Mewshaw’s Sympathy for the Devil, his reminiscence of Gore Vidal, proves easy to praise—swift, canny, sensitive, and unafraid. But Vidal himself, two years after his death, poses more of a challenge. Was his accomplishment literary, finally? Or does he owe his status more to his public persona, and his gifts as a well-spoken cultural gadfly? Such celebrity carries its own weight, to be sure; most writers would gladly give up a masterpiece for a fraction of Vidal’s fame. Nonetheless, the nature of that fame ought to be examined,
Each of Adam Foulds’s recent novels suggests a cloud chamber into which some physicist has introduced particles that won’t bond. In The Quickening Maze (2010), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, he portrays two real-life British poets: John Clare, the son of laborers, who dashes off odes to nature, and Alfred Tennyson, an aristocrat who composes meditations on philosophy and history. These writers couldn’t have stood further apart—and meanwhile other characters introduce additional disagreements—but Foulds makes everything come together. Now, with In the Wolf’s Mouth, Foulds ratchets the conflict up considerably. The novel takes place during World War II,
South and west of central Chicago, there is no 22nd Street. Rather, between 21st and 23rd, the signs read Cermak Road. This thoroughfare follows the Red Line down from the big-money Loop to the threadbare African-American South Side. Roughly halfway between those two poles it crosses Pilsen. The neighborhood’s name derives from the Czech—the people of Chicago author Stuart Dybek—and it has always been an immigrant enclave. In the twenty-first century, the neighborhood is also home to a large community of Hispanics. Thus, the moving, energetic Painted Cities—the debut story collection of a Chicago author to be reckoned with—describes the
Jay Cantor doesn’t flinch at the lash of history. His “Stories for Franz Kafka” dwells on Hitler’s and Stalin’s Holocausts, both of which cast a shadow over Kafka and his work. The Prague fabulist was a Communist and a Jew, and though tuberculosis took him in 1924 (he was 42), many of those close to him wound up suffering torture and extermination. Cantor sifts the ashes to create these four fictions, to greatest success in the two closing tragedies: The penultimate “Lusk and Marianne” spares no detail of NKVD interrogation or a Gulag compound, and the closer spends most of
