novel

[REVIEW] The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli (translated by Christina MacSweeney)

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teeth

Coffee House Press

184 pp, $16.95

 

Reviewed by Leland Cheuk

 

In Valeria Luiselli’s first novel Faces In The Crowd, a promiscuous, melancholy mother loses herself so thoroughly while translating the work of a Mexican poet named Gilberto Owen that her narration slowly becomes that of the equally promiscuous, swashbuckling poet. In Luiselli’s funny new picaresque The Story of My Teeth, Gustavo “Highway” Sánchez Sánchez picks up where Owen left off. He too is a charismatic raconteur whose first-person narration simultaneously charms and cuckolds. Highway not-so-humbly describes himself as “the best auctioneer in the world.” He collects all kinds of objects, including the teeth of the famous. He claims to be wearing Marilyn Monroe’s choppers. He’s got a serious case of Napoleon Complex because he attributes many of his unusual aphorisms to Napoleon (I doubt the French emperor ever said “it wasn’t all velvet petals and marshmallow clouds”). As an auctioneer, Highway spins elliptical, impressionistic love letters about the objects he’s trying to sell. About Plato’s teeth, he says:

Our first lot is a piece in a somewhat deteriorated state…Significant flattening of the point leads to the supposition that the original owner, Mr. Plato, talked and ate continuously…Mr. Plato once made a comparison between the period of dentition and a man falling in love: “In this state, the soul enters into effervescence and irritation; and this soul, whose wings are just beginning to develop, can be compared to a child whose gums are inflamed and enervated by its first teeth.”

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Books We Can’t Quit: The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

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fire

Picador

 

Review by Martha Anne Toll

 

I heard her on the radio; I found her book at the library. Neither sufficed. I had to own Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire. The leading man in this taut, beautiful novel is Aldred Leith—measured, strong, true—crisscrossing continents out of duty, curiosity, and ultimately love. Co-starring are Helen and Benedict Driscoll, seventeen and twenty respectively; together, a single force of nature. Winner of the 2003 National Book Award, The Great Fire inspires and intimidates. I would die happy if I could execute a single sentence as compact, poetic, and meaningful as any in this novel.

Here’s the opening, two sentences to illustrate the depletion of war:

Now they were starting. Finality ran through the train, an exhalation.

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Reading Colorfully: Traveling through the World’s Literature

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By Nichole L. Reber

 

confession_2.inddIt’d be hard to deny Mia Couto’s sparse detail and simple (though stunningly gorgeous) prose echo that of Papa Hemingway’s. But the fissure between hunter and writer in Couto’s novel, Confessions of the Lioness, makes me wish the two authors could have a public discussion over tea or, more likely, beers. Here’s a line that gets me wondering what Hemingway would have thought:

“There’s a time to love and there’s a time to hunt. The two never mix. If I were to give in, I would be betraying an age-old tradition: when one is hunting, one cannot have sex.” Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

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The Heart Goes Last cover

Nan A. Talese

326 pages, $26.95

 

Review by Mary Akers

 

As a thirty-year fan of Margaret Atwood, I eagerly purchased the first few episodes of The Heart Goes Last back in 2012 at Byliner, a reader’s website, when the working title was “Positron” and Atwood was still figuring out what form the story would take. When it grew into a novel and the opportunity arose to review it, I jumped at the chance.

As the novel opens, Stan and Charmaine are down-on-their-luck newlyweds. They have lost their home, their jobs, and are living out of their “third-hand Honda,” doing their best to avoid gangs of marauding rust-belt thugs after a financial crisis leaves middle class citizens marooned in a sea of debt and desperation. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis

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FifteenDogs_cover

Coach House Books

171 pages, $17.95

 

Review by Lynne Weiss

 

Fifteen Dogs, the latest novel by Canadian writer Andre Alexis, compellingly explores the human condition—the need for purpose, spiritual sustenance, food, sex, sensual gratification, and most of all, for love and language—through the perspective of fifteen dogs who have been given human consciousness in the course of a bet between Hermes and Apollo.

All fifteen dogs happen to be in a veterinary clinic next to the Toronto tavern where Hermes and Apollo formulate their wager. “I’ll wager a year’s servitude,” says Apollo, “that animals—any animals you choose—would be even more unhappy than humans are if they had human intelligence.”

Apollo’s brother Hermes (they are both sons of Zeus), accepts the bet on the condition that if even one of the creatures to whom they grant human consciousness dies happy, he wins the bet. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Prague Summer, by Jeffrey Condran

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Prague

Counterpoint Press

288 pages, $26

 

 

Review by Michelle Elvy

 

Long after I finished reading Jeffrey Condran’s novel Prague Summer, the opening quote by WB Yeats lingers in my mind: “What do we know but that we face one another in this place?” It is the most suitable of quotes to set the scene, and this idea that there’s nothing more important than the space between us creates a haunting mood.

The novel begins twice, really. First with a body falling quite beautifully from the sky:

The body seemed almost to float as it left the protection of the window casement. Against the dark sky, buoyed on a humid night’s air, its pale green skirt billowed like gossamer around thin hips and legs. The passive face of the woman looked toward the heavens, mouth open, a few strands of dark hair caught in the corner of her colored lips. For a moment, the whole—skirt, legs, hips, hair—paused cinematically before remembering its obligation to fall swiftly to the unforgiving cement below.

A strong opening moment, a defenestration to set the mood. A woman falling effortlessly, almost gracefully, toward her eventual and inevitable demise. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Island of a Thousand Mirrors, by Nayomi Munaweera

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mirrors

St. Martin’s Press

256 pages, $24.99

 

Review by Michelle Newby

 

“Behind the retreating Englishman, on the new nation’s flag is poised a stylized lion, all curving flank and ornate muscle, a long, cruel sword gripped in its front paw. It is the ancient symbol of the Sinhala…A green stripe represents that small and much-tossed Muslim population. An orange stripe represents the larger Tamil minority…But in the decades that are coming, race riots and discrimination will render the orange stripe inadequate. It will be replaced by a new flag. On its face, a snarling tiger, all bared fang and bristling whisker…A rifle toting tiger. A sword gripping lion. This is a war that will be waged between related beasts.”

The politics of the Sri Lankan civil war are rendered not just personal but intimate as the Buddhist Sinhala (the ancestral dominant caste) and Hindu Tamil battle for the island nation in Nayomi Munaweera’s stunning debut novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors. Reduced economic circumstances force the Sinhala Ranasinghe family to rent the upper floor of their home to the Tamil Shivalingam family. As conditions in the country deteriorate precipitously and the war invades both families, they are forced to flee the island. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald

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Hawk

Grove Atlantic

300 pages, $26.00, hardcover

 

Review by Cate Hennessey

 

 

All great books are works of obsession, but Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk grasps obsession with its elegant, terrifying claws and carries it to the wild intersection of loneliness, grief, falconry, and literature.

After her father’s sudden death, MacDonald attempts to assuage her grief by training a young goshawk she names Mabel. Despite her experience training falcons, Macdonald doubts her ability with the goshawk, a notoriously difficult raptor. But in doubt is often where we find ourselves most alive, and Macdonald is no exception. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride

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girl

Coffee House Press

227 pages, $24

 

Review by Brynne Rebele-Henry

 

Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing is a runic chant for every woman, girl, and infant who has ever been born. McBride’s language is sexual, primitive, almost Stonehenge-like in its spacing and punctuation. The words pound against the page in a style that brings to mind the innermost working of organs in the human body, the language a jumbled elemental call for blood, desolate in its beauty, the prose reminiscent of a desert at four in the morning:

For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day.

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[REVIEW] The End of the City by David Bendernagel

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end
Pink Fish Press
252 pages, $13.49

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

David Bendernagel’s experimental novel The End of the City is a Joyce-like rabbit hole of loss, introspection, and grief. It follows key points in the life of the main character – a guy named Ben Moor – from awkward high school athlete to trained assassin. It vacillates between the character’s past and present so often that you are not always sure of what is happening when. But that is Bendernagel’s intention.

The novel opens in Reston, a city that is noted for both its ruralness and its seedy New Jersey-like charm. To main character Ben, Reston is like a version of Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands – only without the poisonous waste and Jimmy Hoffa:

This place is a chink in the armor, a soft spot in a bad tooth. Here on the outskirts, the city’s street grid is bent out of shape, like a fence mangled by escapees wielding wire cutters—snapped, peeled apart, pushed through. The gully looks like it was created by a car bomb; the real cause was the collapse of an underground cave. The roads glitter with broken glass and come to an end at the edge of the gully, the pavement crumbling and falling into this depression. … On the other side of the gully—scrawny branch tangles, a junkyard overtaken by vines. Civilization crept across this boundary and failed or hasn’t yet taken hold.

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