David Abbott on two books by David Albahari:
Since his move to Canada, now with the added layer of immigrant experience, now as an emigrant from his homeland, Albahari has continued to question the exact meaning of writing, to explore the possibilities and limitations of narration and of identity.
Gabriel Blackwell on Sarah Blackman's Mother Box:
That Blackman chooses to investigate this through the form of the tale is only fitting: where the word “story” is derived from a Greek word meaning “knowing, erudition”—very clearly a cerebral product—”tale,” coming from “tell,” requires a body. If the body is changed, the story may remain the same, but the tale will renew itself. In the tales of Mother Box, the body is shown to be as worthy a conundrum as the mind or the soul.
John Pistelli on William Giraldi's Hold the Dark:
At times, Hold the Dark seems like a polemical response to trends in contemporary literature, implicitly judging social realism to be an evasion of the reality that “man belongs neither in civilization nor nature—because we are aberrations between two states of being,” even as the novel’s refusal to explain fully its supernal elements. . .underscores the crude literalism in the fantastical genres with their eminently reasonable “world-building.”
Comments