Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Liesl Schillinger on Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri: "Lahiri handles her characters without leaving any fingerprints. She allows them to grow as if unguided, as if she were accompanying them rather than training them through the espalier of her narration. Reading her stories is like watching time-lapse nature videos of different plants, each with its own inherent growth cycle, breaking through the soil, spreading into bloom or collapsing back to earth." And on Friday, Kakutani said, "A Chekhovian sense of loss blows through these new stories: a reminder of Ms. Lahiri’s appreciation of the wages of time and mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that plague her husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends."
• Kakutani on The Second Plane--"these chuckleheaded essays"--by Martin Amis: "This pretentious, formalistic argument underscores Mr. Amis’s efforts to deal with a vast historic tragedy with preening, self-consciously literary musings.... 'The Second Plane' is such a weak, risible and often objectionable volume that the reader finishes it convinced that Mr. Amis should stick to writing fiction and literary criticism, as he’s thoroughly discredited himself with these essays as any sort of political or social commentator."
• Liz Phair (yes, that Liz) on Black Postcards by Dean Wareham: See Brad's post from earlier today.
• Joshua Henkin on Last Last Chance by Fiona Maazel: "Maazel’s book has enough event — and enough eccentricity — to torpedo your average novel. But 'Last Last Chance' isn’t your average novel, thanks in no small part to Maazel’s funny, lacerating prose. The book fits squarely in the tradition of novels about the wealthy and dissolute, but ultimately it’s less John Cheever than Denis Johnson — the Denis Johnson of 'Jesus’ Son,' with its drug-addled narrators."

Washington Post:

• Michael Dirda on The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel: "Surely, though, the man is your typical melancholy, dry-as-dust bibliophile? Nope. Not only does Manguel own wonderful books housed in an eat-your-heart-out library in an idyllic part of France, he seems, well, content. According to The Library at Night, he lives with someone he loves, writes during the morning, potters among his books throughout the day and evening, and, come nightfall, sips wine in the garden with visiting friends from around the world. Sigh."

Los Angeles Times:

• Ron Carlson on Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen: "In 'Shadow Country,' Matthiessen revisits his three novels about the career of Watson ('Killing Mister Watson,' 'Lost Man's River' and 'Bone by Bone') and fits them together so that they unfold, layer by layer, mystery by mystery, episode by episode, gathering, gathering, nodding back and forth, in a tangle not unlike the living imbroglio in which the tale is set, the impenetrable jungle wetland of the Florida lowlands. I'll just say right here that the book took my sleeve and like the ancient mariner would not let go."

 

New York Sun:

• Hua Hsu on All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen: "There is something weirdly fetching about 'All the Sad Young Literary Men' — weird because the book describes such a tiny, occasionally infuriating world, one where progressive magazines and book reviews might save the world and crossing paths with the vice president’s daughter is just a part of a Harvard education. It is a world of less-than-practical professions. And yet there is something affecting about the impossibly great aspirations shared by Mr. Gessen’s trio, especially as it shields them from thinking too deeply about the cowardly deeds that pock their day-to-day lives."
• Stefan Beck on Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth: "At the risk of being drowned out or flattened by that stampede, one must confess that the unaccustomed earth is in fact disappointingly familiar territory."

Globe & Mail:

• Andrew Pyper on The Dancer and the Thief by Antonio Skarmeta: "The fact that one of Chile's leading novelists feels free to write a character-driven thriller without hitting the brakes to muse over the long reach of dictatorship's shadow may, however, be a political statement in itself. As one character impatiently points out, it's been more than a decade since democracy was restored. People remember their oppression, but in the insistent present, there are livings to be made.     Or stolen."

The Guardian:

• Patrick Ness on Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones (not available in US yet): "There is so much that could have worked in Pilcrow, so much rich possibility in John's character and circumstances, but even reading with the best will in the world, this is a mightily boring novel. It's intended as the first of a trilogy on the life of John Cromer, but it's hard to imagine wanting to plough through another 1,000 pages of a potentially interesting life rendered very, very dull."
• Carrie O'Grady on The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam by Lauren Liebenberg (also not in US yet): "You could spend a long time happily drawing parallels between their words and deeds, and the postcolonial African situation; no doubt many reading groups will do just that. But the beauty of this book is that it never forces such parallels on you. It is immediate, vivid and rarely judgmental, like the children at its heart. It is also charming, upsetting and poignantly strange to a reader who knows little of southern Africa and its recent history - a book that, like the dreaded guineaworm, burrows deep under your skin."

The New Yorker:

• Jill Lepore on a whole pile of books on the faith of the Founders (sorry for the lengthy quote): "It’s probably impossible to discover precisely what the Founders believed about God, Jesus, sin, the Bible, churches, and Hell. They changed their minds and gave different accounts to different people.... This can make them look like hypocrites, but that’s unfair. They approached religion in more or less the same way they approached everything else that interested them: Franklin invented his own; Washington proved diplomatic; Adams grumbled about it; Jefferson could not stop tinkering with it; and Madison defended, as a natural right, the free exercise of it.... The problem is that constitutional jurisprudence, however essential it is to the rule of law, will always tend to produce a history in which the entire eighteenth century is reduced to the intellectual lives of a handful of men.... Needless to say, it’s a history that leaves out a lot—not least, every other American who ever spread, advanced, or challenged the idea of religious liberty: people like printers turning out newspapers, mothers rearing children, pastors preaching to small towns, and, even, now obscure novelists. Maybe it’s time for another pack of tricks."

--Tom

Comments

[holly on April 08, 2008 at 02:58 PM]

Old Media Monday always makes even horrendous Mondays bearable, but this week you have outdone yourselves. Black Postcards, Library At Night, All the Sad Young ..., stop already! My pile of to-be-read books is growing to an unmanageable level, but thank you for enlarging my rather narrow horizons.