Author: Per Petterson

2010, Graywolf Press

Filed under: Literary

Many reviews of I Curse the River of Time (like this one, from Shelf Awareness) have called it “atmospheric.” A Time review blurbed on the cover says, “Reading a Petterson novel is like falling into a northern landscape painting.” I agree with both assessments, but I found Curse atmospheric and painting-like in that it doesn’t ever seem to move.

It reminded me, oddly enough, of the super-slo-moed Justin Bieber song that made the rounds a few weeks ago. Like the song, Petterson’s novel feels like it was intended to be shorter, but got artificially stretched by 800%. Both song and novel are hard to actively dislike, because both are so unassuming and calm. But both are also hard to focus on, or enjoy, or really get anything out of, besides the vague, disconnected feeling of experiencing them. …
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Author: Thom Jones

1995, Little, Brown, & Company

Filed under: Literary, Short Stories

I loved Thom Jones’s debut collection, The Pugilist at Rest, so I was thrilled to find parallels to his previous work everywhere when I started Cold Snap. His protagonists are still hyped up on life and drugs, desperate, terminally ill, caught in extreme situations or else throwing themselves into disaster. His prose still manages the precision of surgery with the pacing of a car chase. Ad Magic, the amnesiac hero of one of my favorite stories from the previous collection, even makes an appearance.

So if you liked Pugilist at Rest, then there’s a lot to like in Cold Snap. Unfortunately, there’s not much else. For me, these stories were a confirmation of Jones’s talent and a strange disappointment. No single story disappointed me completely, but neither did any deliver with the same force as the best stories in Pugilist, and most of the stories here offered only echoes of Jones’s earlier work. …
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Author: Adam Langer

2010, Spiegel & Grau

Filed under: Literary

The Thieves of Manhattan has been getting a fair amount of attention recently, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it’s formulaic hackery.

It begins as a familiar story about a young writer living in New York, working a crappy job while fantasizing about literary stardom, and dating a perfect girl he doesn’t deserve (and knows he doesn’t deserve). In Langer’s iteration, the young writer is Ian Minot, who works at a coffee shop, and writes “small” literary stories in which characters never do much.

Just as this is taking its first predictable turn (Ian’s beautiful, Romanian girlfriend leaves him and he gets fired from the coffee shop), a strange man approaches Ian and outlines a plan to even the score with the asinine honchos of the publishing industry. The man, Jed Roth, is a bitter ex-editor for a major (fictional) publisher; he’s written a novel about stealing a copy of The Tale of Genji worth millions of dollars. He wants Ian to claim that the novel is in fact a memoir about Ian’s life.

This is when Thieves begins to morph from a familiar, mediocre story into a more complex and bizarre commentary on the publishing industry. In the end, the butt of the joke is you, the reader of Langer’s novel. …
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Author: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers

2009, Penguin Books

Filed Under: Literary, Fantasy, Horror, Short Stories

Here’s one thing not to do with these stories. Don’t leave them on your bedside table so you can read one each night before going to sleep. They aren’t the scariest stories you’ll ever read, but they are warped little tales that will send your dreams off in strange directions over barren, unmarked terrain.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is one of the best-known Russian authors writing today, and this collection offers English-speaking readers an introduction to the supernatural side of her work. These stories range from classic ghost stories to apocalyptic allegories, with a few lighter touches in between. They all bring the straightforward manner of a fairy tale to a contemporary Russian landscape, where there are asylums and hospitals instead of dungeons, and where destiny can take the form of true love or mandatory government service. …
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Author: Seth Grahame-Smith

2010, Grand Central Publishing

Filed Under: Historical, Horror, Humor

Seth Grahame-Smith is the same guy who wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and it shows. This is a good thing, PPZ was excellent–a great mix of classic literature and zombie mayhem. The transition from “literary mash-up” to fake biography was a wise move–the Quirk books after PPZ have been disappointing. I lamented that Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (review) wasn’t as good because it was too inventive, and not true enough to its source. But basically I figured that Winters just wasn’t as good as Grahame-Smith. I’m currently about halfway through Android Karenina, also by Winters, and while it’s not all that good either, I’m realizing it’s not so much the author’s lack of talent but lack of novelty: a truly good horror/literary mash-up probably will only work once.

This book is not a drastic departure from its predecessor but it manages to feel fresh. ALVH is made of the same essence; I’d call it respectful parody. This novel is written in the manner of a biography, as if Lincoln’s secret journals fell into Grahame-Smith’s lap. It works well. (He said in an author interview he was inspired to write this because he found it curious seeing a bunch of Abe Lincoln bios sitting beside Twilight on a bookstore bestseller shelf.) …
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Author: Carolyn Parkhurst

2010, Doubleday

Filed under: Mystery, Literary

Carolyn Parkhurst’s third novel, The Nobodies Album, is a frustrating read. Parkhurst clearly has great talent, but the convoluted project she sets for herself makes genuine success an impossibility.

Nobodies centers around Octavia Frost, a novelist in the second (or possibly third) act of her career. As the novel opens, Octavia arrives in New York to personally hand over a hard copy of her new book, The Nobodies Album, which is a collection of endings from her previous novels, along with revised new endings. (The text of Octavia’s The Nobodies Album is included, chapter by chapter, interspersed throughout the novel.)

But before she can make it to her agent’s office, she gets a call: her son, Milo, a famous rock star, has been arrested for killing his fiancée. Octavia and her son have been estranged for four years, and it has something to do with the deaths of her husband and daughter (but those happened decades earlier).

Almost every passage in The Nobodies Album is, by itself, well made and beautiful. But the overall effect is like using exquisite tiles for a bad mosaic: if you step back to take in the whole work, it’s utterly disappointing compared to any individual piece. …
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[This collection of short stories is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Bruno Schulz

1977, Viking Penguin

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories

Originally written for an audience of one, Bruno Schulz composed the first draft of The Street of Crocodiles in a series of letters to a friend. After editing, publishing, republishing, and translation, these stories still retain the intimacy of personal correspondence. Each one invites you into the narrator’s life, his city, home, and family, and insists that you stay, not just for supper, not just for the night, but as a guest in one of the extra rooms at the top of the stairs.

It’s neither a novel nor a conventional story collection. While characters and conflicts reappear throughout, there’s no continuous narrative arc, and though each piece has its own peculiar preoccupations, the setting and the narrator remain constant from one to the next. It reads like both a childhood memoir and a work of mythology, at once willfully domestic and larger than life. …
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Author: Joe Pernice

2009, Riverhead

Filed Under: Literary

It Feels So Good When I Stop is your typical post break-up story. It’s a short novel, at times funny and at times a bit overwrought. Pernice turns some decent phrases, and the characters and settings are well rendered. It provides a nice diversion for a quick read, but ultimately the plot is too thin for this to be a memorable book.

The nameless narrator is on the lam from his new wife, Jocelyn. Married on a whim–as a band-aid to disquiet in the midst of an on-again-off-again relationship–he left her on the morning of their honeymoon and escaped to hide in a small town on Cape Cod. He takes up residence in a house owned by his sister, occasionaly watches his nephew for his sister’s ex-wife, and becomes friendly with an attractive, tattooed, wanna-be indie documentary director in the throes of mourning her dead son. The story of the narrator’s relationship with Jocelyn is told through a parallel, mostly alternating, plot line.

The humor is subtle and  can be effective in progressing the story and characters. Along with that, Pernice does an excellent job of connecting the two narratives: he presents some expert segues and transitions. Alas, it doesn’t really matter how well things are connected if they don’t go anywhere. While he occasionally flirts with some interesting ideas and plot points, Pernice never really follows them through. Instead the book more or less wanders, telling the stories of the relationship and the delay of its aftermath, with no real consequence or drive or direction. Despite being connected nicely, things here end in the same manner they begin, intriguing yet aimless.

…
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[This collection of short stories is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Tom Rachman

2010, The Dial Press

Filed under: Literary, Short Stories

The Imperfectionists is yet another book miscategorized by its own cover. This is not a novel, not by a long shot, but the fact that it’s not a novel is one of the reasons it works so well.

This is a collection of stories. They are, very loosely, linked: they all feature people connected in some way to a nameless English-language international newspaper based in Rome. Some characters appear in multiple stories, a few in nearly all of them. But instead of a single narrative arc, The Imperfectionists chronicles the interior lives and private problems of each of its varied characters, and it’s that variety and interiority (along with, of course, excellent writing) that makes this collection so strong. …
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Author: Adam Schwartzman

2010, Pantheon

Filed under: Literary

Eddie Signwriter is one of those books you might read for the journey, not the destination. With 293 very tall, very texty pages, it’s quite a bit longer than the page count suggests, and the final payoff, I’m afraid, isn’t quite worth the effort. But much of the language here is lovely. Schwartzman is a poet taking his first turn at a novel, and if you’re able to look past his issues with pacing and theme, you’ll find plenty of passages worth rereading.

Ghanaian teenager Kwasi Edward Michael Dankwa begins an innocent affair with a classmate that, for reasons mostly beyond his control, leads to the death of his girlfriend’s aunt, a respected businesswoman. Eddie is kicked out of school and more or less banished from the town. He wanders for a bit, moves in with an uncle, becomes a signwriter (he paints signs and storefronts for local businesses), then disappears himself from Ghana without a word. The narrative takes us from Ghana to Botswana and back, through Senegal and finally into France.

Sounds like a flurry of activity, right? It is not. The narrative moves along at a snail’s pace. Eddie just kinda bobs along from place to place, and we bob next to him. Worse yet, the big picture never really comes together. …
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