A Breath of Life – Clarice Lispector
Reading A Breath of Life, we feel Time (or God, or Lispector herself) passing.
Bad personality, bad prose, and sexism aside, the narrator’s anxieties about how to novelize history are legitimate.
CONFUSION will resonate with anyone who has felt the tension between desire and knowledge that sits at the heart of pedagogical relationships.
With the Animals – Noëlle Revaz
Revaz makes it possible to feel a certain empathy for Paul, a pity for how small he has made his world and how tightly he needs to control it.
Most haunting of all is the prospect of losing one’s perceptive abilities.
Almost Never is like a comedy of manners cut with a pulpy erotic novel, a social satire impelled by a dripping lecherousness. Most of all, it’s a fantastic, exciting book.
Reticence – Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Toussaint’s novels are filled with darkness and light, both of which are consumed, inevitably, by a gray fog.
Suddenly, a Knock on the Door – Etgar Keret
After all, what is fantasy if not a wish for something new, something else, for some “knock on the door”?
The Femicide Machine – Sergio Gonzáles Rodríguez
That even biology cannot save us now is the gloomy possibility that THE FEMICIDE MACHINE places on the contemporary horizon.
The Case of the General’s Thumb – Andrey Kurkov
This undercurrent of cultural commentary carries GENERAL’S THUMB farther than the story itself.