Reviews

Review: Forgotten Country

March 28, 2012 Reviews

Book by CATHERINE CHUNG
Reviewed by SARAH MALONE

Early in Catherine Chung’s debut novel, Forgotten Country, the narrator’s mother and aunt, as girls in Korea soon after the war, come upon an unexploded bomb in the woods.

“It can’t go off now, can it?” her mother asks.

“Of course it can,” the sister answers. “It happens all the time, don’t you know anything?”

The bomb does not go off, and the sisters make up afterward, and when the elder sister goes to university, she is taken in the night by North Korean agents and never heard from again.

Forgotten Country is unrelenting with such reversals, but with such calm assurance that I had the sense of being borne along on a great river whose pace was not immediately apparent for its scale. There are few moments that cascade into edge-of-one’s-seat crisis; I soon learned to read every page at the edge of my seat, for what is liable to happen when the bombs don’t go off.

Review: Once Upon a River

March 13, 2012 Reviews

Book by BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
Reviewed by KRISTEN EVANS

Once Upon a River

If the Mississippi River belongs irrevocably to Mark Twain, then it’s safe to say Bonnie Jo Campbell has staked her claim in the waters of Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. Campbell’s new novel, Once Upon A River, takes place on an imaginary tributary that flows into the Kalamazoo, the swift, treacherous Stark River. Out of curiosity, I spent some time looking at maps of the Kalamazoo River watershed, comparing them to the map of the Stark River that accompanies the book, illustrated in careful, calligraphic strokes by Adrian Kitzinger. While there’s no clear analog for the Stark in real life, one upward slash of blue caught my eye: Battle Creek. As much setting as character, the Stark is also a refuge and a hazard for abandoned teenager Margo Crane, who takes to its waters to escape the reach of her extended family and the looming threat of Social Services. Margo’s battles are both internal and terrifyingly tangible: after her father’s murder, she struggles to live without him, taking lovers out of an intriguing mixture of sexual curiosity, longing, and an instinctual knack for casting the best odds for her own survival. Part foundling, part Annie Oakley, and part proto-feminist, all Margo wants to do is escape the violent consequences of being on her own long enough to learn how to live.

Review: Swamplandia!

February 12, 2012 Reviews

Book by KAREN RUSSELL
Reviewed by RACHEL B. GLASER

Karen Russell’s novel Swamplandia! (based on one of the stories in her collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves) is the mystical coming of age story of Ava Bigtree, a skilled alligator-wrestler at her family’s failing theme park in the Everglades. Setting plays an important role in this book, and made me notice the settings within a setting. Swamplands, swamp flies, buzzards, and a feverish humid mud mash surround the narrative. Since Swamplandia!, the Bigtree’s theme park, is also a family history museum (Ava’s mother’s wedding dress is on display among other exhibits), family is a setting. The conflation of family and place familiarizes the wildlife around the reader (Ava calls all their alligators “Seths”), while also revealing the darkness and wilderness of a family.

Review: You Think That’s Bad

February 7, 2012 Reviews

Book by JIM SHEPARD
Reviewed by ADAM COGBILL

You Think That’s Bad Sometimes, after finishing a particularly impactful book, I experience a partial paralysis. It’s a sort of ecstatic exhaustion, I think; I’ve felt similarly after long, intense runs. If there is a window nearby, I’ll stare out it without really noticing anything in particular. If my chair is capable of rocking, I’ll do so steadily and rhythmically to the point where people sitting nearby will clear their throats in my general direction. I will occasionally mutter an expletive over and over under my breath. I don’t deny that all this is sort of dramatic. In my own defense, it doesn’t happen that often, and it requires a fairly momentous reading experience. Again, this happens usually after finishing a book. It seems significant, then, that I felt emotionally KO-ed after nearly every story in Jim Shepard’s new collection of short fiction, You Think That’s Bad. The equivalent would perhaps be getting picked up by the same girl eleven times in a row despite having your heart broken every single time. And being ready to be picked up again, if she ever comes back.

Review: One Day I Will Write About This Place

January 17, 2012 Reviews

Book by BINYAVANGA WAINAINA
Reviewed by JENNIFER ACKER

One Day I Will Write About This Place In May of 1945, legendary Scribner editor Maxwell Perkins wrote to a young soldier serving overseas. The enlisted man had sent Perkins a short story and asked for advice about pursuing a writing career. Perkins was gently encouraging, urging the young man to take his time distilling his war experiences into fiction. By way of instruction and inspiration, he tells of visiting his author and friend Ernest Hemingway in Key West. “We went fishing every day in those many-colored waters, and then also in the deep-blue Gulf Stream. It was all completely new to me, and wonderfully interesting—there was so much to know that nobody would ever have suspected, about even fishing. I said to Hemingway, ‘Why don’t you write about all this?’”

Hemingway replied, “I will in time, but I couldn’t do it yet.” Pointing to a pelican Perkins recalls as “clumsily flapping along,” the author added, “See that pelican? I don’t know yet what his part is in the scheme of things.”

Review: 1Q84

January 3, 2012 Reviews

Book by HARUKI MURAKAMI
Translated JAY RUBIN and PHILIP GABRIEL
Reviewed by EMILY GRECKI

1Q84

Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is no meager feat. At nine hundred twenty-five pages, published as three volumes in Japan, two in the UK, and one here in the US, it is the grandest novel he has yet undertaken.

The novel primarily alternates between the stories of two characters, Aomame (the name means “green peas” in Japanese) and Tengo.

Aomame works as a fitness instructor, but is also a secret assassin. Originally motivated by the murder of a childhood friend, who died at the hands of her abusive husband, Aomame created a weapon that leaves no traces. She is recruited by a wealthy widow, who runs a safe-house for battered women, to use this weapon to take the lives of abusive men who cannot be incapacitated through other means. On the way to complete one of the widow’s jobs, Aomame is forced to take a detour on foot off a traffic-jammed highway. After climbing down a rickety service staircase, Aomame realizes the world around her has changed. The policemen carry different weapons and there is a slaughter that she never remembers reading about in the newspapers. Two moons hang in the sky. She is no longer in the 1984 she knows; she dubs her new reality 1Q84.

Review: Cutting for Stone

December 6, 2011 Reviews

Book by ABRAHAM VERGHESE
Reviewed by MANISHA SHARMA

Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese’s debut novel, is nothing less than an epic in prose. The long narrative, setting, characters, conflicts, and quotations that read as invocations all set out to prove this. It begins with the lines from Gitanjali, the celebrated poetry collection of the Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore

Review: The Pale King

August 23, 2011 Reviews

Book by DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Reviewed by ADAM COGBILL

The Pale King

I saw David Foster Wallace read at Franklin and Marshall College in 2006. He was nervous and funny and an excellent reader. But, as with any writer whose writing I’ve loved, it was strange to hear the way Wallace’s reading of his work differed from my reading of his work. I was made aware that my relationship was primarily with his prose, not with him. More specifically, with prose that he’s done with, that’s been sent out into the world to have a life of its own. So, I will admit that I initially didn’t want to read The Pale King. I assumed it was being released only because publishers figured someone would buy it, not because it was a potentially important piece of literature. (And regardless of what I’m about to say in a few paragraphs about changing my mind, it’s worth noting that at the top of the inside front flap of The Pale King, above the summary blurb, is printed, “David Foster Wallace’s last and most ambitious undertaking,” a claim which, at the very least, should make fans of Infinite Jest clear their throats pointedly.)

Review: So Good in Black

July 19, 2011 Reviews

Book by SUNETRA GUPTA
Reviewed by JENN MAR

So Good in Black

In Sunetra Gupta’s So Good in Black, the devil is a fashionable industrialist with a seaside villa in Bengal, and he’s guilty not of any overtly malicious crime, but of donating milk to children. Incredible as it may seem, evil in this novel is not made of sulfur and coals, but of institutionalized power driving the market of ethics. It’s this market of ethics, or ethical imperialism, that Gupta explores in her fifth novel, a novel that unfolds with heated conversations, and dialogue resembling philosophical debates.

The premise guiding these debates is just as sinuous as the devil himself. American travel writer Max Gate returns to Calcutta to attend a woman’s funeral, and like all travelers returning to a destination after so many years of misery, Gate experiences a heightened sense of wonder, and chill, towards the landscape so inextricably tied to his memories. As he surveys the beach, following a shadowy figure along the seashore, the daughter of a woman from his formative years, Gate delivers an incantation to the past: “Child on the seashore, I loved your mother once.

Review: Not Now, Voyager

July 12, 2011 Reviews

Book by LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ
Reviewed by HANNAH GERSEN

Not Now, Voyager

Travel poses a particular seduction to writers, especially writers between projects, which Lynne Sharon Schwartz admits was her predicament when she began Not Now, Voyager. After completing her novel, The Writing on the Wall, which dealt with post 9/11 New York City, Schwartz wanted a retreat from American politics. An easy solution was to leave the country. But Schwartz didn’t want to go elsewhere in search of inspiration. For Schwartz, travel is “a distraction from writing—from living,” and often leaves her feeling bereft. During travel, Schwartz writes, “Most of me seems to have remained at home, or dormant, or in a state of suspended animation….” Her attitude, she realized, was unusual, or at least not one championed in a culture of rapid globalization. Not Now, Voyager was conceived as an antidote to this, and how much it succeeds as such depends on how much you enjoy wandering around Schwartz’s mind.