Reviews
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Review of The Invented Part (Trilogía las partes #1) by Rodrigo Fresán
As much as I would like to rate this book 4 stars, I cannot. It was too clever, too deep, too fluid, too geometric, too weird. I devoured portions of it, and felt myself drowning during other portions. It took me quite a while to finish. I had to rent…
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Review of Phosphor in Dreamland by Rikki Ducornet
Extravagant!Like Nabokov, Rikki Ducornet delights in the use of vibrant language. Unlike Nabokov, she has been hiding in plain sight for years. I had to ask myself why I haven’t read her work before. What took me so long? Segments of this novel reminded me of the work of Gabriel…
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Review of The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen
Arthur Machen is, along with Blackwood and Bierce and Clark Ashton Smith, an early proponent of weird/ supernatural horror fantasy. Whereas Lovecraft seemed to revere Dunsany, Machen’s influence is not as apparent. He seems to inhabit the outskirts of literature, as no one’s favorite. From the get-go The Hill of…
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Review of Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates
I found this novel, above all, to be exuberant, ambitious, bold, and extremely readable. JCO has wrung all the suggestion and menace she could from her sumptuous setting. Not familiar with the author’s infinite body of work – I have only stumbled across a few short stories, liked them, and…
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Review of Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah
What starts as a quiet tale of a struggling middle class youth in Korea becomes a disorienting and surreal fable of identity, love, and art. At the intersection of Murakami and Kafka, Bae Suah occupies her own corner of contemporary literature. At times as light and charming as Banana Yoshimoto…
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Review of No Longer Human by Junji Ito, Osamu Dazai
Oddly, this is not the only manga adaptation of Osamu Dazai’s novel. It is the only adaptation you will need, but it is not necessarily easier to read than the original. It is 600 pages of interrelated scenes, and masterful, atmospheric artwork, which require just as much concentration as any…
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Review of My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays by Steven Moore
This is a book of professional book reviews, about 780 tall pages. All about writers from the 20th Century, with maybe a few exceptions for writers from the late 19th and early 21st. As explained in a closing essay, this is the pseudo-third volume of his Alternate History of the…
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Review of The Golden Lotus Volume 1: Jin Ping Mei by Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng
Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng was the author of one of the 5 Great Chinese novels. This is his contribution to immortal letters. There are many English versions of Jin Ping Mei. The five volume edition, which is more than 2000 pages in length, suffers from hundreds of pages of notes. If…
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Review of Selected Short Stories by Honoré de Balzac
Balzac, I have found, is one of those authors you can read for your whole like, like Dickens, spreading out the oeuvre as necessary Balzac’s books, in my opinion, are not to be consumed like snacks or junk food. They are hearty vegetables, often not terribly exciting, but vigorous and…
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Review of The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories
Since I’ve read every word Haruki Murakami has published in English I felt obligated to read his introduction once it showed up in the preview on Amazon. People saying “Haruki Murakami is my favorite author” has now become a cliche. But cliches can sometimes be true. His introduction was nice…
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Review of Peace by Gene Wolfe
I never expected so much depth. While it is barely Science Fiction, it is most certainly literature of the highest caliber. Like Faulkner, Wolfe constantly cripples the reader’s understanding with his obscure perspectives and elegant suggestion. Chronology and irony are never explicit, and characters are always hiding pieces of their…
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Review of Fado Alexandrino by António Lobo Antunes
Grandmaster of Metaphor Trying to come up with the right word to describe Antunes’ prose is difficult. Any comparisons are superficial, but I’ll mention all the writers he resembles in minor ways. The best single word I could find was “tintinnabulation.” That’s what his words do. They rattle around in your…
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Review of The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu
Ken Liu is one of my top five favorite short story writers working today. And he is really the only one of the bunch being prolific. I believe he has published over 80 stories in most reputable speculative fiction magazines over the past 10 years. He attained the remarkable feat…
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Review of Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
Mieko Kawakami’s novel Breasts and Eggs is a bold literary statement and another first person, modern, feminist novel from Japan. Staking a claim among literary celebrities like Banana Yoshimoto, Hiromi Kawakami, Natsuo Kirino, and Yoko Ogawa, it would almost appear that the future of Japanese Literature is female. It would…
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Review of Crash by J.G. Ballard
A 2008 interview with Vice quoted infamous mangaka, Shintaro Kago, saying: “Shit and sex are merely the starting points, and unless you can tick those off you can’t even begin thinking about a narrative.” Grotesque literature has its paramours, and Ballard sits in the ranks of William S. Burroughs and…
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Review of The Land at the End of the World by António Lobo Antunes
Antunes tunes into vivid illusions. Had I known of his work, I wouldn’t have bothered reading László Krasznahorkai. Mr. Lobo’s work has the same breathless fluidity, but the imagery is stronger, the dramatic pulse is quicker, and it appears far more inclusive, as opposed to the Hungarian’s stark Beckett-like isolationism.…
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Review of Parade by Shūichi Yoshida
Parade is a seamy novel by a Japanese novelist. It does not fit nicely into the “crime novel” formula. Its characters do not care if you are staring at them in horror and fascination. Its plot is not concerned with your level of patience. Though it has a similar texture…
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Review of The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
A very interesting book. No plot, no realistic characters, no dialogue. It’s not strictly philosophy, or poetry, or a diary. It is a mixture, a concoction. Aside from a few topical details, it might have been written by a Chinese, or an American, or anyone. Did you ever have a…
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Review of The Miner by Natsume Sōseki,
I didn’t expect this novel to leave such a big impression on me. It seemed like a throwaway novel in Soseki’s oeuvre, with hardly any character development, almost no plot and little adornment. But it is a subtle exploration of character, theme and atmosphere. It’s an adventure novel disguised as…
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Review of 2666 (2666 #1-5) by Roberto Bolaño
Read on a cruise ship. And I remember very little else about the cruise itself. This was eight years ago, but the book stands out in my mind, murky but stamped among the convolutions of my hippocampus. This book reaffirmed why I love reading. It is a book of literary…
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Review of The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann
Swept away by the alternately sensuous and utilitarian prose, the incredible diversity of emotions I encountered while reading this book defied strict categorization and boggled my mind. It felt like my brain had tipped sideways and any trite notions of innocence I might have held in reserve in the untouched…
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Review of Unbabbling by REYoung
This Dalkey Archive discovery is deceptive in its approach but memorable in the extreme. The prose is packed with slapstick, imagery and song, an equal ratio of panic and satire, passion and heartache, while it bubbles over with bombast, belligerence and, after acclimatization, brilliance. Truth be told, it took about…
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Review of Sea Above, Sun Below by George Salis
Sea Above, Sun Below by George Salis is a rich and masterful novel. While reading it, from the beginning to end, I never doubted I would rate it five stars. It is a balanced reading experience, told from differing perspectives, chockablock with symbolism and allusion and wordplay. The descriptions of…
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Review of Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier
I devoured this scrumptious coming-of-age novel in two sittings. On the level of voice, character development, and humor it struck all the right chords. It’s Catcher in the Rye with a female lead, more modern, more swear words, and just more adult. Easily a cult classic, it was one of…
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Review of The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe
One of my favorite books of all time. One of the best film adaptations of a book as well, done by Hiroshi Teshigahara in collaboration with Abe. Both are equally mesmeric. Kobo Abe’s well-honed, surreal worlds became etched permanently in my mind, and this novel more than his others. Even…
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Review of A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
I always enjoyed the line from Jonathan Swift – “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” This novel, much like Swift’s, is a scathing satire. Ignatius Reilly is both a truly sad main…
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Review of If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
Intrigued by the title, one day I opened this book, didn’t get it, put it back, saw it again years later, did the same thing, stumbled upon it again years later with a sense of déjà vu, read no more than a few pages. For some reason, it seemed as…
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Review of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest – the kind of book that, when it is mentioned, creates a hushed silence of mingled awe and fear in the room. A brick of a tome of a journey of a boy and his harried growth in spurts of tennis-fueled tragedy. An obsessive, compulsively readable, unreadable contradiction.…
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Review of Antkind by Charlie Kaufman
A literary apocalypse of compulsive cinematic ungendering. More Kafkaesque than Kafka. More borgesian than Borges. Less Shakespearean than Homer. These accolades mean everything and nothing. Because accolades, in any form, tell partial half-truths, like any communicable piece of information, as Kaufman shows us ad nauseam, in this Rabelaisian charade of…
L. S. Popovich 