Reviewed by Olivia Heal
“I was raised in rural Yorkshire … I still have a deep feeling, which dates from my childhood, that you shouldn’t waste anything, especially words”—the matter-of-fact tone set by this phrase from Daisy Hildyard’s previous Fitzcarraldo-published book, The Second Body, glides, or say, steps into her latest, the novel Emergency. Words aren’t the subject here, but rather what they point at. Language is like glass, meant only for seeing through, for designating what is on the far side. The style recalls earlier modes of signifying: the tree is the tree. Simply that, without complication, complexity, or nuance. It’s an illusion, of course, that the world can be transcribed in words, but the mimetic writing here is convincing enough to persuade that this world is the world. As John Berger might have put it, each lion is Lion, each ox is Ox. Or indeed, in current terms it might be called phenomenological writing: descriptive, attentive, making an experience of engaging directly with the world available to its reader. And as with glass, the effect is of seeing more clearly than with the unframed and unfiltered point of view, than with the bare, the illiterate eye.
Reviewed by Jan Wilm
For my money, Solstad is the contemporary writer most capable of expressing the death of the soul in our time. He’s also hilarious. The strange events that pepper the continually monotonous lives of his characters rival the weirdest literary incidents in a surrealist and absurdist tradition that ranges from Nikolai Gogol to Daniil Charms to Leonora Carrington to César Aira. The way these incidents transpire, however, is so singular that it should be described with Ane Fårsethas’s term “Solstadian”—though I personally would prefer something a little more suitably odd, perhaps “Dagesque.” What Fårsethas sees as Solstadian in her Paris Review interview with the author is concerned mostly with Solstad’s style, his long sentences that weave and wander like those corkscrew clauses of the two famed Thomases: Mann and Bernhard. Apart from Solstad’s idiosyncratic style and language, what I see as peculiarly—let’s go with it—“Dagesque” is the way the author structures his novels. Solstad surrounds the weird events in his fictions with lives lived in such a thicket of mundanity and boredom that the intruding strangeness seems much more striking than in the previously mentioned writers’ invariably weird worlds.
Reviewed by AM Ringwalt
The Voice of Sheila Chandra, the latest collection of poems from the U.S.-based author Kazim Ali, concludes in question: “Do you remember / Which question / Needs answer.” In a book with form blown open by subtle and sustained interrogation, the relationship between audience and performer surpasses static binary. This final question functions as a verbal haunt: who is its intended recipient? In The Voice of Sheila Chandra, the reader must comb through the text’s intersecting questions and answers—spanning three expansive poems and four hymn-like interludes. Ali is consumed by his sonic influences, so much so that his documented acts of listening generate distinct performances on the page. These poems are mediums for his listening, his embodied mortality. He writes: “To hear is to make real.”
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 Sam Carter
In a famous 1943 ink drawing, the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García portrayed South America through the perspective that had been used to depict North America. He called it América invertida—“Inverted America”—and, true to its title, placed the equator at the bottom of the image and the southern continent at the top. The point is simple yet powerful: there is no reason for Latin Americans to look elsewhere for aesthetic inspiration. Compass needles might be pulled inexorably toward magnetic north, but Torres-García indicates art need not orient itself in the same way. Cartography’s conventions are revealed to be contingent and even detrimental; the status quo, in his work, proves to be imbalanced—and ripe for upheaval.
Reviewed by Louis Klee
As if speaking from between these parentheses, transforming their constraint into a site of liberation, “I, Hazel Brown, eldest daughter of a disappearing class, penniless neophyte stunned by the glamour of literature”—that is, the “she-dandy” narrator Lisa Robertson’s remarkable, sultry, cerebral, and finally original novel The Baudelaire Fractal—defiantly assumes this tradition. “When I recognized afresh the courage it takes for any girl to not disappear to herself, I am still shocked. Could the image of my own self-appearance open a possible world?” The answer, as this novel makes vividly apparent, is yes, and yet self-appearance is no easy task. It may be a difficult and radical act. “I had to destroy art,” declares Hazel, “in order to speak my monstrous life.” Monster, according to one tradition, has its etymological roots in the Latin monstrare and French montrer: to show or make apparent. It could be that simply to manifest the she-dandy’s life or “a female thinking” without making concessions to realism—for Hazel, “another name for capital”—is to simultaneously write one’s life and a manifesto, to manifest oneself in a poise of simultaneous luxuriance and insurgency.
Reviewed by David Grundy
Kaufman preferred to recite his poetry in coffee shops, bars, or on the street rather than publish it in print. All three of his collections were compiled by editors from the scraps, written and oral, he left lying around. Kaufman deliberately cultivated marginality, yet he was also marginalized—subjected to forced electroshock treatment, harassed by racist police, penniless, and virtually homeless. In his later years especially, Kaufman existed on a kind of periphery, a ghostly figure glimpsed on San Francisco street corners or in North Beach bars, boisterously living out his poems.
Reviewed by Jon Day
Historical novelists are more parasitic than most writers of fiction. They hang their stories on the scaffolding of established fact, inhabiting and exploiting gaps in the historical record. In this, writing historical fiction is a bit like performing music. Both activities depend on balancing fidelity to your sources with creative embellishment of them. Too free an interpretation and you might be accused of ignoring the facts or deviating from the score; too constrained and you’ll be writing biography rather than fiction, mechanically reproducing a piece of music rather than performing it.
Reviewed by Spencer Ruchti
Jon Fosse has written repeatedly on suicide, melancholy, excruciating loss, the role or absence of God, and the border between this life and whatever follows. To read his enormous body of work in panorama is to see the frequent exchanges between the living and the dead, but also beautiful white visions as the curtain draws shut. “The whole of Septology is possibly just an instant, a loaded one, a moment of death. When a person dies it is said that one sees life repeated. Septology can maybe read as such a moment,” Fosse has said in an interview…
Reviewed by Sandra Simonds
The snapshots with their oversaturated blues and reds are inseparable from the time period in which they were produced. No one would look at these photos and believe that they were made at any other time than when they were made: they are not merely reproductions of the early 1970s, they are the 1970s.
Reviewed by Marc Farrant
During a 1992 interview with Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee, critic Richard Begam surfaced the well-worn issue of the death of the novel, positing that literature had “fallen into a debilitating narcissism” which produces works “of interest only to the academic” before asking after Coetzee’s thoughts. Notoriously taciturn in public and thoughtful in interviews, Coetzee suggested that the tightening bond between writers and the academy has indeed led to more esoteric forms of the novel, and with regard to himself: “Yes, I may indeed by cutting myself off, at least from today’s readers; nevertheless, what I am engaged in doing is more important than maintaining that contact.” Since the 1990s, it is tempting to see a correlation between increased academic interest in Coetzee’s works and his decreasing engagement with, and from, the public. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize in 2003 largely recognized him as the preeminent writer of the South African experience, for example, as we see in the powerful apartheid allegory Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Disgrace (1999) grappled with the country’s uneasy transition to a post-apartheid state by reflecting on the career and disgrace of a middle-aged academic. The truth, however, is that by 2003 South Africa had receded into the rearview mirror and Coetzee’s new work, Elizabeth Costello, was positioned firmly on academic soil. This philosophical novel, featuring an eponymous academic protagonist touring the world delivering lectures on topics such as animal rights and renaissance humanism, set the tone for Coetzee’s writings in the 2000s, including the Jesus trilogy and its culminating installment, The Death of Jesus. . .
Reviewed by Daniel Green
Since I came to Notes Without a Text unfamiliar with its author, Roberto Bazlan—like, presumably, most readers of this book, which marks the first translation of his writing into English—I first sought out what information I could about Bazlen (known to his friends and colleagues, I discovered, as “Bobi”). Little criticism of his writing exists—at least not in English—but that is unsurprising, since not only have Bazlen’s writings long remained untranslated, but were in fact never published at all during his lifetime. Bazlen didn’t merely choose to keep his work out of circulation (a version of Kafka, say), but actually left almost no tangible work at all. Indeed, Bazlen seems to have approached his one major creative effort, a novel called The Sea Captain, in a way that deliberately ensured it could not be completed. “It is,” writes Roberto Calasso in his introduction to Notes Without a Text, “a part—and a decisive part—of Bazlen’s work not to have produced any work.”
Reviewed by Cam Scott
When composer, priest, poet, and instrumentalist Joseph Jarman passed away in January 2019, a bell sounded in the hearts of thousands of listeners. As an early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), as well as its flagship group, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Jarman was a key figure in the articulation of Great Black Music as a multi-generational ethic rather than a standard repertoire. As an ordained Buddhist priest, Jarman’s solicitude transcended philosophical affinity and deepened throughout his life as his music evolved. His musical, poetic, and religious paths appear to have been mutually informative, in spite of a hiatus from public performance in the nineties—and to encounter Jarman’s own words is to understand as much. The full breadth of this complexity is celebrated in the long-awaited reissue of Black Case Volume I & II: Return from Exile, a blend of smut and sutra, poetry and polemic, that feels like a reaffirmation of Jarman’s ambitious vision in the present day. . .
Reviewed by Ian Dreiblatt
“The story began,” the singular Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko once wrote, “without resistance, as a rumor, a conch shell in the fingers.” This scene, where we dream through a kind of lyrical murk, something uncertain pulsing in the semantic mist, is classic Dragomoshchenko; consciousness, in all its bizarreness and intricacy, finds its bearings by inviting, and also resisting, meaning. A little further into the poem, Dragomoshchenko writes, “Names come later, resembling diaries, / lagoons, lanterns, chalk. Later still, in common speech, / ‘now’ encounters the word ‘now.’” Awakeness narrates its discovery of itself. . .
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 Tristan Foster
The fulfillment of desire is a theme which unites all the stories in Anne Serre’s The Fool. “I have the demon of love in me,” Maman says in “The Wishing Table.” In each text, the main characters do as they please — maybe as they must — despite everything. The Fool disrupts. The Narrator narrates. The family in “The Wishing Table” do, for better or worse, what they hunger for. On the opposite side of this, either on the other side of the walls of the house in which the fiction takes place, or outside of the book, in the real world, is the normal, the expected, the proper. The place where longings of a certain kind are necessarily tucked away, out of view. Until, of course, they aren’t…
Reviewed by Jan Wilm
Some books, like most summer holidays, feel entirely undeserved and all too brief. Such is the case with the delightful Castle Gripsholm, the only novel by the German writer Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935). Known chiefly as a journalist, a waspish (and very witty) critic of the burgeoning Nazi regime, Tucholsky – who at one point circulated texts under five pseudonyms to service his productivity – wrote poems, short stories, and this beauty of a novel. . .
Reviewed by Sam Carter
Just as “Guiding the Ivy” sets the tone in opening The Scent of Buenos Aires, the career-spanning collection of Hebe Uhart’s short stories, so does its premise undergird the author’s entire life. Uhart, who died little more than a year ago, was both generous and open-hearted on and off the page, but life never trampled or confused this legendary figure of contemporary Argentine literature. Her stories instead exhibit a clarity that emerges from roots in the everyday rather than the extraordinary, and as a result they resemble plants that are perfectly adapted to pots. They are not merely decorative: they steadily, unobtrusively oxygenate the world around them…
Reviewed by Éric Chevillard
“But what’s the word for a male florist?” my eight-year-old daughter asks. I know that terms like authoress and woman of letters are no longer irregularities in terms of vocabulary, but in terms of judgment? Hard to say. It’s amusing to see, in a Larousse dictionary from the nineteenth century (1866–1879), the following entry: “AUTRICE: Bygone feminine form, now obsolete, of the word auteur.” But there remain so many injustices, so many inequalities, that our sensitivity around the issue is deservedly deep and unforgiving. Gender is no laughing matter, not even for us Frogs (this being the feminine derivation of frogman, naturally). And a lady chef? There is no word for her in French other than cheftaine: not the most appetizing option, but then we all must play the chards we’ve dealt for ourselves. The Swiss and the Québécois have opted for cheffe. Marie NDiaye does too, in The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel . . .
Reviewed by Noah M. Mintz
The labels of “migrant” and “immigrant” have always been politically charged, but especially so in these times of immense, widespread displacement. “I know we would usually say migrant stories,” the Kampala-born author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi recently said in an interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “but I’m moving away from that and using the term expat experiences, because I’ve noticed that when the British are talking about their immigrants in Europe who are now being affected by Brexit, they don’t talk about them as immigrants, they call them expats.” Her stance is not rooted in theory: speaking from her home in Manchester, as one of over 50,000 Ugandan nationals now residing in the United Kingdom, her choice of words is significant. And they underpin her latest book, Let’s Tell This Story Properly, a collection of stories reflecting the experiences of her compatriots both in Manchester and in Uganda…
