Among Strange Victims – Daniel Saldaña París
What does it mean to participate in a literature wherein novels and writers are described, as José Donoso laments in The Boom, as “too cosmopolitan, too intellectual . . . absolutely not what is expected from a Spanish American novelist”?
Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador – Horacio Castellanos Moya
The novel reveals as much about Bernhard’s style as it does about Salvadoran society.
The Hatred of Poetry – Ben Lerner
Lerner notes the many things his book doesn’t do, perhaps succeeding by suggesting a potential better book. But it still doesn’t do them.
Into this web of familial discontent and uncertainty enter those mysterious dogs.
The Sky Isn’t Blue – Janice Lee
This is Bachelard for the age of the digital memory, the confessional Bachelard.
Here are some other technologies that humans control despite a barely functioning civil society: Nuclear weapons. The Internet. Drones. Here are some archetypes that don’t appear in this novel: Gringos. White people.
Letter to the Amazon – Marina Tsvetaeva
[Marina Tsvetaeva] responds to [Natalie Clifford] Barney’s celebration of lesbianism largely through the lens of her own experiences in a homosexual relationship and with her regret-tinged return to a heterosexual one.
The same non-intervention the biologists practice on the island — not to leave a human mark on the fragile ecosystem and thus to merely observe, even when a baby animal is dying and could be saved by a small push in the right direction — is extended towards each other.
PROBLEMS is hypnotic and dank, an intimate gurgle from a person to whom you have become so endeared you decode it. And you know it’s beautiful.
Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens – László Krasznahorkai
Like Krasznahorkai’s fictions, his sentences (or in this case, series of clauses) conspire together, in a kind of interlocking state of indecision, building a sense of elusive, strangled exasperation.