NOW I SURRENDER, La Frontera's history told very differently...on the 2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

NOW I SURRENDER
ÁLVARO ENRIGUE (tr. Natasha Wimmer)
Riverhead Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

On the 2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A visionary novelist imagines the fiercely fought end of an epoch of almost unimaginable freedom and radically recasts the story of how the West was “won.”

In the contested borderlands between Mexico and the United States, a woman flees into the desert after a devastating raid on her dead husband’s ranch. A lieutenant colonel in service to the fledgling Republica, sent in pursuit of cattle rustlers, discovers he’s on the trail of a more dramatic abduction. Decades later, with political ambitions on the line, the American and Mexican militaries try to maneuver Geronimo, the most legendary of Apache warriors, into surrender. In our own day, a family travels through the region in search of a truer version of the past.

Orchestrated with a stunningly imagined cast of characters, both historical and purely fictional, their storylines playing out in multiple eras, Now I Surrender is Álvaro Enrigue’s most expansive and impassioned novel yet. Part epic, part alt-Western, it weaves past and present, myth and history, into a searing elegy for a way of life that was an incarnation of true liberty—and an homage to the spark in us that still thrills to its memory.

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My Review: Yes, it felt to me like the narrator was a self-insert, was a bit showoffy in a story that honestly was not in need of ornamentation; just add footnotes and this is a non-fiction corrective to settler colonialism's lying mythmaking. Funny how when a rotten to the core politico needs a way to juice his polling before a rough election battle it's always at the cost of a darker skinned man being sold a bunch of bullshit about making peace and meaning murder (his, not the politico's) and it's frankly weird how often Florida is involved either directly like Alligator Alcatraz or indirectly like Geronimo learned. I'm stunned by how little imagination it takes to dupe people who don't learn even the lies and half-truths they're sold. Reuse threats even names and the audience is inclined to shrug at most, lap it up at least.

The violence of the events of how the West was "won" is breathtaking. Author Enrigue does not soft-pedal its stomach churning reality. It was the stuff of public record at the time, why lie about what "They" were clearly proud of? And speaking of "Them," it is one of Author Enrigue's narrative tactics to reduce characters to labels, the colonel or the warrior or suchlike in paragraphs lacking quotation marks or certain kinds of line breaks...heads up. I know many of y'all really hate when authors do that. It's in service of a teaching. It's not really important to have a family or personal name for a cog in the machine of treachery theft and genocide, and equally unhelpful to present a victim's personal data like that because it's not how their murderers victimizers abusers see them. They're not even important enough to the thieves to merit numbers tattooed on their arms.

When names are give it is to reinforce what is lost in their extermination. Otherwise it's cultural extirpation's great success to use labels. The terrible cost, the awful price, the nightmare of depersonalization and dehumanization...all, at every turn, reinforced and durable in its suffocating rage-baiting cruelty and pointless judgment.

The 2026 longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature is *stacked* with good reading. Start here.

THE EYE OF GOLIATH, Argentine Jekyll-and-Hyde take after the Great War

THE EYE OF GOLIATH
DIEGO MUZZIO (tr. Rahul Bery)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending September 15, 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A dark, propulsive literary gothic novel that puts a modern twist on Stevenson and Poe, from a thrilling new voice in Latin American horror.

“Impossible to stop reading. It has all the fascinating tension of great literature.” — Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night

In this deliriously inventive twist on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Argentine powerhouse Diego Muzzio conjures a haunting story of shattering war trauma and the disturbing proximity of sanity and madness in his English-language debut.

In 1920s Edinburgh, war veteran Dr. Edward Pierce develops experimental therapies to treat mentally ill patients whose cases have been rejected by conventional psychiatry. One night, he receives a visitor who asks him to take on an unusual new patient: David Bradley, an engineer who was sent to inspect the conditions of a lighthouse on a remote island in southern Argentina. The sojourn was a disaster, and he returned completely mute, his body overwhelmed by a single compulsion: to swim and swim, in any environment, to the point of total exhaustion.

Bradley’s fragmentary diary reveals how this rational, disciplined man became the deranged individual brought to the sanatorium. Full of bizarre details and echoes of macabre events, it guides Pierce in his studies of his patients, propelling him into scientific terrain that grows increasingly grotesque.

With an ingenious structure that creates doubling and uncertainty at every turn, The Eye of Goliath is a masterfully tense novel that unites classic gothic atmospheres with disturbingly modern psychological horror.

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My Review: A lot like seeing the narrative's events in the sweeping beam of the lighthouse that figures so heavily in poor David Bradley's utter unwinding. Pierce tries to tug the strips of anxiety back into overlapping armor-plate relationship as the are in most of us. Pierce's major problem with that technique has been, until now, the Great War's soulless killing machine dehumanizing men in battle.

David Bradley's issue is not the same though his condition, a mind unraveled by inputs beyond the owner's capacity to process and respond to in any adaptive manner, is the same. Compulsions to repetitive action are present in the men not able to build mental spaces that can contain their horror very often resort to obsessive actions to create rituals of safety. Spurious safety is still preferable to the events that left their minds in wreckage. We're vouchsafed access to the diaries Bradley kept at the lighthouse where...something...destroyed his psychological equilibrium; yet neither we nor Pierce, tasked with reversing this damage, know what the heck it was even *with* the diaries.

It's a very good thing the novel is short because that would be really tough to sustain over an Ann Radcliffe-length novel. We're definitely in gothic horror territory here, particularly given Pierce's own responses to everything, but not so deep into it there are ghosties and ghoulies and other accoutrements of gothicness.

It says here.

Ambiguity is always your friend in writing and reading good gothic fiction; don't pin too terribly much of the story to recognizable territory and the reader will do the work for you, will in fact make your story "better" because you love this trope and the author does not so doesn't explicitly use it so your mind fills it in where ambiguity is left. I wish more horror writers saw the utility of that! If you, o writer, are not as weird and twisted as Clive Barker, do what Author Muzzio did: keep it short, leave room for we-the-reader to people the events to our scare levels, and off you go...and so will your readers.

I'm only down a half-star because I found Pierce's entry into the gothic felt forced, felt incompletely integrated into the way the men he's treating's mindset. I don't think my pleasure in the read would've increased had his own psychotic break been more completely explored. It would've added page count without necessarily improving my eerie experience.

Which was, as said above, eerie and satisfying; it was the flipside of the model story's splitting the personality on purpose. It was a very involving, fast read. Psychological-disturbace avoiders, go to the next book on the shelf! Eerie creepy weirdness fanciers, come sit with me by the fireplace.

Maybe we can light a fire.

STEFAN ZWEIG'S PAGE: LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN and Other Stories, & ENCOUNTERS AND DESTINIES: A Farewell to Europe

LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN and Other Stories
STEFAN ZWEIG (tr. Anthea Bell)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$7.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Stefan's Zweig's Letter from an Unknown Woman and other stories contains a new translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell of one of his most celebrated novellas, Letter from an Unknown Woman, the inspiration for a classic 1948 Hollywood film by Max Ophüls, as well as three new stories, appearing in English for the first time.

A famous author receives a letter on his forty-first birthday. He doesn't know the sender, but still the letter concerns him intimately. Its story is earnest, even the story of a life lived in service to an unannounced, unnoticed love.

In the other stories in this collection, a young man mistakes the girl he loves for her sister; two erstwhile lovers meet after an age spent apart; and a married woman repays a debt of gratitude. All four tales, newly translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell, are among Zweig's most celebrated and compelling work-expertly paced, laced with empathy and an unwaveringly acute sense of psychological detail.

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My Review: It's the fate pf a popular, I mean with readers more than critics, writer to fall out of favor. Without critics in one's corner, the voice of the people who voted with their time and their treasure to engage with one's stories gets ignored.

This was the public's loved one Zweig's fate. Modern critics don't like him either, one saying he "...tastes fake...the Pepsi of Austrian writing." Ouch.

It's true to my experience of his writing that there's no deathless quality the I can discern, the sort of intense transporting intensity I experience in Thomas Mann or Kafka. At his most eloquent Zweig brings me an appreciative lightness of spirit; at his most Germanic he's pissy, irritable, and unbearably portentous. On balance he's the precise kind of writer who becomes popular because his (very real) talent does not have threatening depths. It seems a shame to me the world that loved him best, the US and Brazil, has left his memory in a drawer. Not a great, but still a good, storyteller, it feels to me like Pushkin Press Classics is doing good work to keep bringing him to our notice.

In my usual, fussy (so I'm told) fashion, the four stories will be dealt with by the Bryce Method.

Letter from an Unknown Woman is unsettling, uneasy-making; a woman writes to a famous author in terms of the greatest, most appreciative intimacy...but he has absolutely not one clue who she is. It is clear from the terms she's using for him that there was a legitimate connection between them. It is chilling how deep this connection truly is, given his unawareness of her as a person. (It could have something to do with her age at their first meeting....)

It's certainly true in my own life this kind of connection has formed, so I might be a bit more in tune with the awfulness of it. It ends a damn sight more tragically than anything like I've ever been a party to, and uses what would then be a current event...the 1918 flu pandemic...as both a resolution and an intensification of how terrible his guilt truthfully is.

A 1948 film was made of Letter from an Unknown Woman starring Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan that did not slap a happy li'l bow on its end. It's been preserved for posterity by the National Film Registry, probably in part for that courageous act of honesty in preserving the source material's more nihilistic intent (despite much jiggery-pokery to satisfy the Hays Code). It would be a terrific adaptation to make, faithfully this time, in the 21st century. all five stars

A Story Told in Twilight explores the first-kiss mishegas of a very ordinary boy. It happens in circumstances that, if you squint, might possibly lead to the, um, inattention and subsequent mistaken identity that plague this most commonplace rite of passage.

The translation's deft, the language felt like the entire enterprise was fun for the translator, but a more outdated premise would be tough to conjure in 2026. Not memorable, not terrible, not much of anything really. 3 stars

The Debt Paid Late looks at the running theme of missed/mistaken connections in these stories at a more mature angle. Like the old saying about "even small men cast big shadows at sunset" comes the accidental meeting of a woman with an old man who once meant everything to her. Because the story is about older people who reconnect from a genuine, if squicky by today's lights, connection it involved me more. Not a lot more, but more. 3.5 stars

Forgotten Dreams happened to me. It was as unpleasant as Zweig writes it. If you put yourself back into the path of your past self you will not come out unscathed. No man should ever expect the women from his past to spare his feelings, I'll tell you that for free. 3.5 stars

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


ENCOUNTERS AND DESTINIES: A Farewell to Europe
STEFAN ZWEIG (tr. Will Stone)
Pushkin Press
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A new selection of essays by Stefan Zweig: tributes to the great artists and thinkers of the Europe of his day

Stefan Zweig was one of the twentieth century's greatest authors and a tireless champion of freedom, tolerance and friendship across borders. Encounters and Destinies collects his most impassioned and moving tributes to his many illustrious friends and peers: literary, philosophical and artistic luminaries from across the Old Europe that Zweig loved so much, and which he grieved to see so cruelly destroyed by two world wars.

Including pieces on Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, Maxim Gorky and Arturo Toscanini, this essential collection is also Zweig's tribute to the ideal of friendship: an ideal he clung to as the world he knew was torn apart.

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My Review: "Gorky" means bitter? I'd always known Peshkov chose a pseudonym, who wouldn't with a collection of ugly spitty sounds like "Peshkov" staring you down, but "bitter?" Wow. A lot of details I'd forgotten I noticed clicked into place in my long-ago readings of Gorky...The Lower Depths, The Artamonov Business...suddenly make all the sense in the world.

Zweig knew the great and the good of the Interwar Period wherein he spent the bulk of his life. He would've been a lot of fun at a dinner party because, while it does not seem that he had a bitchy bone in his body, he had a very retentive memory and a strong desire to keep the friends he made so he heard a lot about them.

I am hard-pressed to imagine anyone who does not know who John Drinkwater was without the aid of Wikipedia will be inclined to pick up a book of musings on people like Toscanini, Arthur Schnitzler, and Emile Verhaeren. (For someone who doesn't like poetry, I sure know who a lot of poets are.)

If for no other reason than to bask in the glow of warm, appreciative writing by a friend who treasured friendship writing about his friends, this is a Zweig book to immerse yourself into. It brought me up short to realize how much the culture of that time formed my sense of aesthetics. I still revere Remarque and Joyce. I think many serious readers do. But it goes deeper, forming a bedrock sense of what is "worthy" in the art world, and that interested me to realize.

So here's Zweig, eighty-four years dead and mostly forgotten, still teaching a now-old man about himself. Published again and again after being forgotten for decades.

I hope there's an afterlife just so he can know it was, in fact, all worth it.

JEAN GIONO'S PAGE: Fragments of a Paradise & Occupation Journal & Ennemonde

OCCUPATION JOURNAL
JEAN GIONO (tr. Jody Gladding)
Archipelago Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$7.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A captivating literary and historical record, Jean Giono's Occupation Journal offers a glimpse into life in collaborationist France during the Second World War, as seen through the eyes and thoughts of one of France's greatest and most independent writers.

Written during the years of France's occupation by the Nazis, Jean Giono's Occupation Journal reveals the inner workings of one of France's great literary minds during one of the country's darkest hours. A renowned writer and committed pacifist throughout the 1930s—a conviction that resulted in his imprisonment before and after the Occupation—Giono spent the war in the village of Contadour in Provence, where he wrote, corresponded with other writers, and cared for his consumptive daughter. This journal records his musings on art and literature, his observations of life, his interactions with the machinery of the collaborationist Vichy regime, as well as his forceful political convictions. Giono recounts the details of his life with fierce independence of thought and novelistic attention to character and dialogue.

Occupation Journal is a fascinating historical document as well as a unique window into one of French literature's most voracious and critical minds.

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My Review: Knowing that these quotidian topics of no great interest are Author Giono's middle-of-WWII maunderings while his pacifist life was under the Vichy apparatus of Nazi occupation's close scrutiny makes them fascinating. It's a universal truth that life goes on, kids need clothes and meals and trips to the doctor. Author Giono navigates his way around every obstacle with his money and his persistence and his connections. Being in the toils of legal proceedings for his well-documented lifelong pacifism meant he was never a serious threat who needed close custody. Left to read and write, though subject to censorship, Author Giono writes unselfconsciously in these journal pages (always intended to remain private) of his process as a writer, his frank assessment of other writers' work, and the people of the village of Contadour.

It reminded me that the evergreen thought experiment "whatever you're doing now is what you'd be doing under Nazi occupation" makes one stop short and think hard for a reason. Author Giono took his privilege as a reason to spread the good fortune around: he never has any cash, and owes the government a pile of money, all because he's supporting his whole family...nine people in total...as well as bankrolling the escapes of those who are at lethal risk from that government he owes so much money to.

Using "their" money to keep "them" from committing murder against people whose morals he shared. Full marks, sir. And he did not stop there. He completed six novels (translated another...oh, there were plays too!) during the German occupation. Author Giono was a truly inspiring example of how to live a morally good life in bad times and under dark circumstances.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


FRAGMENTS OF A PARADISE
JEAN GIONO (tr. Paul Eprile)
Archipelago Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: “Giono’s prose is a singularly fine blend of realism and poetic sensibility.” — The Washington Post Giono’s very own Moby-Dick, a sensational maritime journey that follows a crew inwards on a spiritual tale of evocative sea-glimpses

An allegorical critique of modern civilization and the damages of war, Giono’s oft-overlooked seafaring tale sweeps the reader along a narrative as poetic and undulating as the wind, tacking between the sea’s mysteries and the intricacies of the men’s conversations and inner thoughts as they attempt to grasp the sensory reality around them.

“I no longer have any interest in living under the conditions that this era allows,” writes the Captain of L’Indien, a ship whose radio remains packed in a crate in the hold. The men aboard won’t be needing it; they have no interest in connecting with the world of ordinary men. With enough provisions to last them five years, they set sail in July of 1940 for the South Seas, leaving civilization behind in search of the unknown.

Hastening onwards, Giono’s men steer deeper into themselves, seeking a purpose beyond the “world in upheaval” they left behind—a moving and spiritual work written by one of Europe’s most ardent 20th-century pacifists.

A sensational novel that delves into the unknown reaches of the sea and soul, perfect for readers seeking a poetic escape that challenges the political and social status-quo.

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My Review: Really, do I even need to say it?

This read was a beacon of psychic coolness in a summer beset by wildfires, smoke particles, and the looming, ugly threat of super-El Niño to come with its heat and its drought. It's beautiful, as one would expect from a writer of Author Giono's stature, sentences making images that endure on the eye the nose the ear of the mind as the men on this sailing ship leave their families and friends behind to fight their war, rebuild their world, however they like.

No one who leaves the world does so without leaving others behind.

It's beautiful until the thought, "you have provisions for FIVE YEARS and you left a literal WAR ZONE to escape into a cosmic search for love, truth, and beauty?!" hits.

Stay there and use that magical power to feed hungry wounded orphaned victims.

Yes yes yes, it's a fable, an unreality meant to instruct and to offer guidance on one's search for Meaning, all very well. Author Giono was a pacifist who was punished for opposing the Vichy regime...see above for his journals in review...but this kind of navel-gazing is for the time leading up to war, in an attempt to forestall the slide; this tale appeared in 1948, as the rebuilding of the continent was gathering steam. That was the moment to support peaceful action not hightailing it off to sea to have cool adventures.

Anyway. Beautiful sentences, we're not rebuilding stuff (though we should be), so read and enjoy.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


ENNEMONDE
JEAN GIONO (tr. Bill Johnston)
Archipelago Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: One of the final novellas by the acclaimed French writer Jean Giono, Ennemonde is a fierce and jubilant portrait of a life intensely lived

Ennemonde Girard: Obese. Toothless. Razor-sharp. Loving mother and murderous wife: a character like none other in literature. In telling us Ennemonde’s astounding story of undetected crimes, Jean Giono immerses us in the perverse and often lurid lifeways of the people of the High Country, where vengeance is an art form, hearts are superfluous, and only boldness and cunning such as Ennemonde’s can win the day. A gleeful, broad sardonic grin of a novel.

"Roads move cautiously around the High Country..." So begins the story of Ennemonde, but also of her sons, daughters, neighbors, lovers, and enemies, and especially of the mountains that stand guard behind their home in the Camargue. This is a place of stark and terrifying beauty, where violence strikes suddenly, whether from the hand of a neighbor or from the sky itself.

Giono captures every wrinkle, glare, and glance with wry delight, celebrating the uniquely tough people whose eyes sparkle with the cruel majesty of the landscape. Full of delectable detours and startling insights, Ennemonde will take you by the hand for an unforgettable tour of this master novelist's singular world.

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My Review: Not remotely comfortable reading, Giono using this female body's looks and size as commentary on her character and morality. Perfectly ordinary in its time; sixtyish years ago people said terribly cruel things about those larger than, or in any way divergent from, "average."

The young women, while they're still maidens, possess a fruit-like beauty; then the beauty bursts, and fragments of it can be seen in their children. Truly nothing remains of these women's former state. Some Venuses turn into fearsome monsters; almost all of them have seventeenth-century mouths, toothless or, even worse, with a handful of loose teeth on which they suck. It's pretty ghastly. But their simple-minded appearance shouldn't be taken at face value. Almost all of them are commanding women. With their back to the wall they achieve wonders. People still remember Ennemonde Girard.

It does not hit the same register in 2026 as it did in 1968, when it first appeared. It feels false, hostile, spoken for effect in the #MeToo world.

There's probably a good reason for that: the French are not so terribly far from the US despite their fantasies:

The tool that people around here have most often in their hand is a shotgun, whether it’s for hunting or for, let’s say, philosophical reflection; in either case, there’s no solution without a shot being fired...
–and–
The Protestants of these parts had since time immemorial protested against Protestantism. They’d ended up worshipping anything at all, so long as the anything at all demanded intolerance. Crown of thorns were consumed in every household, at every meal. Religion was a sort of commerce in which discomfort was always preferred to joy, scorn to pleasure, and ultimately vice to virtue.

"These parts" are Author Giono's native Provençal mountains, where he lived his life.

It's not so weird after all, fellow intolerant lefties; humans been MAGAts a long damn time.

I can't claim to love this story, I can't tell if it's because I'm a judgmental old man or I'm just a product of the times that brought this novella (150pp barely) into being, holding its subjects up for a cold-eyed considering examination. Author Giono does not vouchsafe a verdict; I do.

Me no likee.

VLADIMIR SOROKIN'S PAGE: Oprichnik's Russia duology

THE SUGAR KREMLIN (Oprichnik's Russia #2)
VLADIMIR SOROKIN (tr. Max Lawton)
Dalkey Archive Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 trade paper, preorder for fulfillment tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A puzzle of colorful, sardonic episodes that come together as a portrait of totalitarian society as a whole.

Sugar Kremlin follows the near-future universe of Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, crafting a set of 15 chapters that all return to the symbol of the The Sugar Kremlin. Thousands of these creations are being given away to citizens on the street, from lucky children to secret political dissidents, torture-obsessed civil servants, sex workers in a nearby bordello, and more.

As Sorokin moves from story to story, he draws the reader through the dark streets of life in Russia, creating a metaphysical encyclopedia of the Russian soul through a deceptively sweet sugary treat. Presenting a wide variety of genres and tones, Sugar Kremlin lays out a frightening vision of speculative mercilessness and quirky political horror.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Not a novel. A collection of fifteen stories set in the storyverse of Day of the Oprichnik but without overlapping or recurring characters. The structure here is centered around a literal "sugar Kremlin", a treat made of sugar in the shape of the Kremlin that's like an Advent calendar or a fruitcake or other holiday treat in ubiquity and celebratory affect.

That alone makes this unnerving, dystopian fantasia of a 2028 Russia unsettlingly like the Project 2025 US we're living in. The characters are constantly munching on, consuming, discussing the lusciousness of, this nutritionless pure sugar abomination.

On the nose much, Author Sorokin?

Expect the usual transgressive behaviors (I've been uneasily eyeing my hammer), the expected degradation and cruelty, the obligatory violent and vicious conduct. Sorokin is not going to coddle your imagination. The stakes here are too high. This duology (this one published in 2008 in Russian, 2025 in English, printed now that Dalkey Archive's under new ownership) is a trumpet blast, containing every dissonant and perverse note in Literature's instrumentation, to get the reader to see, really see, what is going on. It's been the brief of this press since its founding in 1984.

What made this a slightly-less-stellar read than Day of the Oprichnik for me was the episodic nature of stories...they don't really synergize to create a paralyzing terrified awareness of the overarching story's validity and possibly even applicability to 2025 US life. It's not what stories do, nor are they supposed to. What they've done as collected here is make the whole feel more melodramatic than dramatizing reality as a novel does. I was a bit thrown by a story titled "The Queue" because that's also an (unrelated) novel by Author Sorokin. It was brief but it threw me out of my flow state.

I am, then, one of those who are not au fait with Author Sorokin's contention that "The contemporary world is so complex and protean that it is no longer possible to describe it with linear prose and squeeze it into a traditional novel's structure." (From his interview with Joshua Cohen that forms the Introduction to the book.) I read a lot of linear novels; they do a creditable job of linear presentation of an inherently nonlinear world; I do not see that what I've just read has a notable advantage over, say, The Words That Remain (a linear-prose novel that presents complexity, pathos, cruelty, and love effectively). I readily stipulate that I'm possibly missing the point of his statement, or too dull of apprehension to get more than a dim gist of it.

Nonetheless, I experienced this read as a collection of well-made stories ready to épater les bourgeois as they...we...so badly need literature to do. Author Sorokin is ready, willing, and able to do this duty, with verve and panache, and scatology and violence.

It needs doing. It needs reading.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK (Oprichnik's Russia #1)
VLADIMIR SOROKIN (tr. Jamey Gambrell)
FSG
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Moscow, 2028. A cold, snowy morning.

Andrei Danilovich Komiaga is fast asleep. A scream, a moan, and a death rattle slowly pull him out of his drunken stupor—but wait, that’s just his ring tone. And so begins another day in the life of an oprichnik, one of the czar’s most trusted courtiers—and one of the country’s most feared men.

Welcome to the new New Russia, where futuristic technology and the draconian codes of Ivan the Terrible are in perfect synergy. Corporal punishment is back, as is a divine monarch, but these days everyone gets information from high-tech news bubbles, and the elite get high on hallucinogenic, genetically modified fish.

Over the course of one day, Andrei Komiaga will bear witness to—and participate in—brutal executions; extravagant parties; meetings with ballerinas, soothsayers, and even the czarina. He will rape and pillage, and he will be moved to tears by the sweetly sung songs of his homeland. He will consume an arsenal of drugs and denounce threats to his great nation’s morals. And he will fall in love—perhaps even with a number of his colleagues.

Vladimir Sorokin, the man described by Keith Gessen (in The New York Review of Books) as “[the] only real prose writer, and resident genius” of late-Soviet fiction, has imagined a near future both too disturbing to contemplate and too realistic to dismiss. But like all of his best work, Sorokin’s new novel explodes with invention and dark humor. A startling, relentless portrait of a troubled and troubling empire, Day of the Oprichnik is at once a richly imagined vision of the future and a razor-sharp diagnosis of a country in crisis.

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My Review: From the vantage point of late 2025, a post-Putin neo-medieval Russia in 2028 sounds...oddly optimistic...as well as wrong. From 2005's standpoint it probably seemed more likely; even though nothing in this book could be called hopeful, it was probably sounding good to Sorokin just not to have Little Vladdy Pu-Pu on the tsar's throne.

Predictions always miss something. Usually they're too optimistic, too hopeful, and weird to say that's the problem with this bleak prediction-fest. *waves at Little Vladdy Pu-Pu on his throne* I'm not entirely convinced the religious fervor of the Oprichnia, as revived from the days of Ivan the Terrible (an epithet with multiple valences in English, all of them applicable to the bearer then...and by extension now), is not active in 2025 let alone 2028.

With his characteristic OTT revulsion-inducing behaviors foregrounded, this book is automatically beyond the pale of all too many squeamish readers. I would say "try to get past it" but honestly...don't. One is meant to be revolted and put off by it, much as the 1972 John Waters shocker Pink Flamingos is not meant to titillate but shock and offend (fifty-plus years on, it still does). The world Author Sorokin posits is intended to be just as appalling and revolting, to disgust you and repel you! The entire reason to hold a dark mirror of satire up is to draw attention to the wrongness and cruelty of the world being posited. By no means is it accidental that so much of it is grimly familiar. The theocratic angle is the one not quite fully rolled out by our allegedly separate government. Just wait.

This edition was published in 2011, and it is only more relevant and more horripilating in 2025's world of ICEstapo and wholesale social upheaval caused and inflamed by the most powerful in our country.

MURDER IN THE HOUSE OF OMARI, modern iteration of the Japanese locked-room mystery

MURDER IN THE HOUSE OF OMARI
TAKU ASHIBE (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Osaka, 1943: as the Second World War rages and American bombers rain death down upon the city, the once prosperous Omari family is already in decline, financially ruined by the terrible conflict. Then the household is struck by a series of gruesome murders.

Can anyone solve the mystery of these baffling slayings before the Omari line is extinguished entirely? To do so, and unravel the killer's fiendish plot, they will have to delve into the family's past, where a dark and deadly secret has been festering for decades...

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Dark secrets! Wartime as economic disaster! Lies and murder in a beauty-products business! What more can a mystery reader want?

How about a family saga (bookmark the list of characters or all is lost), with an old family business floundering after losing...somehow...the heir to the place, the prestige slice of the health-and-beauty market they'd banked on keeping to wartime supply and in general the economic depression inherent in postwar economies, and the new head (adopted after marrying the lost heir's sister) not having the power to make changes?

All that and more coming soon. First, though, understand the pace is not twenty-first-century but period-appropriate. The book was written and published in the 2020s, but it feels more vintage than it is. I myownself think this is a feature not a bug, but you might not. Take heed.

This isn't a story with huge revelations, or shocking twists, but with the women who decide to solve it working it through because, well, what's another death in a country so very recently ravaged by World War II and its often-fatal privations? Natsuko, a doctor, is primarily a rational thinker and a keen observer...doctors tend to be both...who sees things differently from the other women, Mineko and Tsuruko, who are her fellow sleuths.

It's not the fair-play playbook, but the clues *are* there; you can indeed solve the murders, and trace the lines of motive, if you're attentive. I paid attention and got it 50% right...it was one of two people and one indeed was guilty.

I found a lot of the interpolations of newspaper stories and the like to be pacing-killers (those missing stars), but enjoyed them nonetheless. I was kept happily engrossed the entire read. I hope you will be as well.

THE TOKYO ZODIAC MURDERS, a fair-play, betcha-you-won't-solve-it Japanese locked room mystery

THE TOKYO ZODIAC MURDERS
SŌJI SHIMADA (tr. Ross MacKenzie & Shika MacKenzie)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An amateur detective races to solve a decades-old murder mystery in this “bloody and bizarre” Japanese crime novel with a twist hailed as “one of the most original” (Daily Mail).

Astrologer, fortune teller, and self-styled detective Kiyoshi Mitarai must solve a macabre murder mystery that has baffled Japan for 40 years—in just one week.

With the help of his freelance illustrator friend, Kiyoshi sets out to answer the questions that have haunted the country ever since: Who murdered the artist Umezawa, raped and killed his daughter, and then chopped up the bodies of six others to create Azoth, ‘the perfect woman’?

With maps, charts, and other illustrations, this story of magic and illusion—pieced together like a great stage tragedy—challenges the reader to unravel the mystery before the final curtain falls.

This quintessential Japanese “logic mystery”—eerie, gory, and intriguing—combines the puzzle-solving of Golden Age Western detective fiction with elements of shocking horror and dark humor.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Japanese locked-room mysteries are pretty much exemplars of the genre. Unlike Dame Agatha's versions of the genre, they include a bit more gore...this one feels like it could easily have made itself a mild body-horror story with very little authorial effort...but the focus really is on the puzzle.

That focus is evident from the epistolary outset. The entire first thirty-plus pages is a letter written in 1936. It is the statement of purpose for the rest of the book: A murderer pens is intended crimes in detail, explaining why he intends to do these...vile, violent, violating...things to women.

Now, that right there? The crimes being committed against women for a man's gratification? That will get me to Pearl-Rule a book for good and ever. In this case I did not because I felt the facts presented in this introductory letter-cum-statement-of-purpose put the reader into the mindset of knowing the murderer's sickness. As a result, there was no prurient titillation of discovering the women's bodies to learn what had been done to them. I got in my head the purpose of the story, as it shifted into forensics, into crime-solving, because I knew what the crimes were for. I had already decided how twisted and sick the crimes were.

You should know this going in: Misogyny is on full display in very deeply disturbing ways.

Kiyoshi Mitarai, our sleuth, is in the modern day of the book...early 1980s Japan...solving an unsolved cold case. He's unusual in today's world for being a New-Age practitioner of astrology, a thing that was really prominent in culture at that time. He gets interested because the daughter of the police detective who failed to solve the case, dead now after a blighted career from this case, thinks her dad's soul can rest if the failure is reversed by solving it. Her brother horns in and sets our sleuth a serious time limit of five days to complete the puzzle, or the son will blow up old dirt about Kiyoshi.

As is necessary for a locked-room puzzle to get solved, Kiyoshi has a sidekick to think out loud to, and to do some legwork that the audience doesn't need to see. We'll learn it when mystery book lover, and importantly book illustrator, Kazumi Ishioka delivers the information anyway. (Side note: There is, for each timeline, a dramatis personae...prepare to use it A LOT.) The way the story is presented is largely through these two guys sitting and talking through what they know, how they know it, where they've been, and the like. Direct action? Not a lot. Fun little grace notes of these dudes preening for each other, making friend-jokes, talking about stuff that really does have something to do with the case but does not look like it? I'll read that over a run-around drenched in gore-fest. The world is violent enough.

The story's replete with floorplans and crime-scene illustrations (courtesy of Kizumi) and the details are numerous, hard to track, well-buried meanings abound. It is a delightful time for logic-puzzle reader. It turns meta when, approaching the end, the author directly addresses the reader, asking if we've solved the puzzle yet. Okay, thought I, now I'm aware that I have all the information I need to do it. So I sat me down to think. I flipped to some illustrations. I thought some more. I came up with a perp's identity. I read the rest of the story.

I was wrong. I was sure I was right, and I did not see until it was explained to me what I had missed.

That's a reading experience I really enjoy a lot. Get you one for some #Deathtober fun and games.

RILKE IN PARIS, pretty object, interesting tale, but about someone I did not like knowing more about

RILKE IN PARIS
MAURICE BETZ (tr. Will Stone)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Rainer Maria Rilke offers a compelling portrait of Parisian life, art, and culture at the beginning of the 20th century

In 1902, the young German poet Rainer Maria Rilke travelled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He returned many times over the course of his life, by turns inspired and appalled by the city’s high culture and low society, and his writings give a fascinating insight into Parisian art and culture in the last century.

Much of this work, despite its perennial popularity in French, German, and Italian, has never before been translated into English. This book brings together Rilke’s sublime poetic meditations on existence Notes on the Melody of Things and the first English translation of Rilke’s experiences in Paris as observed by his French translator Maurice Betz.

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My Review: I've read as little poetry as I've been able to over course of the past sixty-plus years. I've stated why (I don't enjoy it), I've explained why (it's pretentious and condescending), and yet here I am reviewing with praise a book about a poet, by his French translator, published after his sad, early death from leukemia.

Praise?

Praise: The essay on why Rilke wrote poetry is beautiful, deeply moving, and really makes me wish I didn't hate the experience of reading the...stuff. Song lyrics are poetry, so why do I listen to music voluntarily if I hate the stuff in a song? It's in the essay. The melody of the world is not audible to all of us in the same way. I "hear" prose; Rilke "heard" poetry, and made some beautiful poems in the world's opinion. I'm not arguing they're not; based on the essay in here I will bet there are gorgeous poems to his name.

For those who like poetry. I am still not one of you.

Maurice Betz observed Rilke being in the Paris of his time with an intensity I reserve for my lovers. I would guess Rilke was a little bit aware of the depth of Betz's attention. Rilke was under the influence of Rodin and swayed by the older man's frankly nonsensical contention that artists, true artists regardless of métier, must forego personal life and the pursuit of family and sex and friendship. Hogwash! But Rilke did somewhat wake to the foolishness of that, though never completely; he was a rootless wanderer despite being married and fathering a child; not to mention an impressive sexual CV of important artists and creatives, as well as that aforementioned wife.

He was, in other words, the bog-standard thing of beauty and a boy forever; Peter-Panning his way through life and taking nothing but himself seriously. I read this between Betz's besotted lines. What a selfish, rotten way to live one's life. Yes, he wrote right nice. I'll agree to give him that. It does not, in my 2025 eyes, redeem his narcissistic personality that used and discarded multiple people.

But lawsy me, does Maurice Betz love him! It was warming to feel how much he resonated to the Rilke shy-boy charisma. The way he wrote about Rilke is so apt, so fully aware of him: "Paris both fundamentally oppressed Rilke, compelling him to depart elsewhere, and summoned him back with a kind of nostalgic urgency, which he was unable to resist. ... In fact, it is evident that, along with Italy in a supporting role, France and French culture are the dominant guiding forces of Rilke's adult life, exemplified perhaps by the fact that he celebrated this relationship by writing some four hundred poems in French, translated a clutch of French poets, chose to settle in a French-speaking region and became, in his later years, more deeply absorbed in the work of the French poet Paul Valéry than in that of any other poet."

With photos I can't show you, this text is very much more suited to someone who loves poetry, has more than a Wikipedia-level familiarity with his work; my main connection, and a pleasant one, is to Rilke's Francophilia, to his off-kilter sense of himself as other than how his friends saw him.

I'm glad I red the book. I'm glad I didn't know him, or he'd've got an earful about his using others. No loving Maurice Betz, me.

RAGNAR JÓNASSON'S PAGE: The Criminologist Helgi Reykdal three-book series

THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THE MISSING CRIME WRITER
RAGNAR JÓNASSON (tr. Victoria Cribb)
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: One winter evening bestselling crime author Elín S. Jónsdóttir goes missing.

There are no clues to her disappearance and it is up to young detective, Helgi, to crack the case before it's leaked to the press.

As he interviews the people closest to her—a publisher, an accountant, a retired judge—he realises that Elín’s life wasn’t what it seemed. In fact, her past is even stranger than her stories.

As the case of the missing crime writer becomes more mysterious by the hour, Helgi must uncover the secrets of a very unexpected life . . .

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Three timelines again: 1965 (investigated by Hulda, whom we see but all is not what it seems), 2005, and book-present, 2012. Dirty deeds done in each. It is now a Ragnar trope. While each one was, in fact, required to resolve the crime Helgi's investigating, the book-present ends on a cliffhanger...but not the one you're expecting. Still, the phobic about such things should know that before committing to the read.

Elín S. Jónsdóttir seemed to me to be Over It All before she disappeared...her 2005 interview (with Kristin, fellow series-readers) was, shall we say, adversarial and quite insinuating. I was left with an impression that this would go somewhere more central than it did...still played its part in a different way. It is not presented anywhere in its entirety, but is broken into chunks...I saw why, but it took time.

I think this might be the thing I enjoy most about Ragnar's storyverse. Everything does always connect up, only sometimes not where you thought it would. Helgi is a listener first and foremost. He comes across to more action-loving procedural readers as a bit passive. He's a thinking machine. (Anybody remember Futrelle's character, or am I the sole survivor?) Only better-looking....

It's a series, and it slots into other series written by Ragnar; the storyverse must needs be left a bit baggy at the knees in individual cases to work the way they must as a unit. One consistent factor that appeals to me is Helgi's explicit love and reverence for Dame Agatha Christie. It is obvious to me that Ragnar wants the Icelandic love of reading and its astonishing book culture to be on display in this series. Fine by me! You go, reader-boy! "That's what books are for: they help you travel to places you wouldn't otherwise be able to visit, journey through worlds that don't exist." I'd have that tattooed on me if I could think of a place to have it where I wouldn't have to explain who "Helgi" was every five minutes.

Lastly, let me just say that I hate Bergthora even more now. And Helgi needs to get that mess sorted by professional means. He's a cop faGawdsake!

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DEATH AT THE SANATORIUM
RAGNAR JÓNASSON (tr. Victoria Cribb)
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 1983

At a former sanatorium in the north of Iceland, now a hospital ward, an old nurse, Yrsa, is found murdered. Detective Hulda Hermannsdottir and her boss, Sverrir, are sent to investigate her death. There, they discover five suspects: the chief physician, two junior nurses, a young doctor, and the caretaker, who is arrested following false testimony from one of the nurses, but subsequently released.

Less than a week after the murder, the chief physician, is also found dead, having apparently fallen from a balcony. Sverrir, rules his death as suicide and assumes that he was guilty of the murder as well. The case is closed.

2012

Almost thirty years later, Helgi Reykdal, a young police officer, has been studying criminology in the UK, but decides to return to Iceland when he is offered a job at the Reykjavik police department—the job which detective Hulda Hermannsdottir is about to retire from.

He is also a collector of golden age detective stories, and is writing his thesis on the 1983 murders in the north. As Helgi delves deeper into the past, and starts his new job, he decides to try to meet with the original suspects. But soon he finds silence and suspicion at every turn, as he tries to finally solve the mystery from years before.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: At last we really *meet* Helgi. He does appear in Whiteout, though not very prominently. I say this with all the love in my heart...I like Helgi more than Ari Thór as a lead character. He's still got the bookishness, the clear love of puzzle-solving; he is a bit more of a distinctive character to me because he's explicitly an Agathan. It comes through in this resolution to an unresolved murder ("cold case" just feels on the nose for Icelandic crimes somehow) previously worked by Hulda Hermannsdottir, whose retirement he is enjoying by being brought home to Iceland from the UK to replace her.

One of humanity's great achievements, largely undersung about, is the reduction of TB from pandemic to chronic disease. As John Green reports in his Everything is Tuberculosis, an excellent book and a must-read for those in need of heartening, it's been a partial victory but still a very significant one. This murder took place in a TB asylum in 1983 as its use case was disappearing. In the novel's present day, 2012, the asylum is empty of patients and used as a research facility. As Helgi assumes his duties, he uses retired Hulda's involvement in the unsolved murder as the topic of his dissertation; so now he is in the same country as the scene of the crime, he determines to find out what really happened in 1983. This does mean we spend more time with Hulda. That's not a bad thing for Helgi or we-the-reader. Old wounds are not healed, it would seem, and another murder occurs that needs solving as Helgi's poking around picks up steam.

Vintage Ragnar-style, the setting is spooky and cold and full of bad energy or haunted by ghosts or something like that...it's never really explicit just what it is, which leaves room for we-the-reader to decide what works best. The limited pool of suspects for the original killing is still alive, so no problems of needing a medium to conduct interviews. It might've been safer that way. Helgi goes about studying the crime, the building a case for the new crime, with the same calm, assured demeanor. His doubts, like his very murky personal life...I hate his partner Bergthora a LOT!...are present in the story but not very foregrounded. I appreciate Ragnar offering us a sleuth-centered procedural that does not feel the need to make it indistinguishable from a domestic novel.

It was, if anything, a bit gothic in its TB ward in snowy conditions, an unknown killer stalking the place, whose identity I genuinely never expected to know...I thought this would remain an unsolved case...but when revealed became inevitable and so very sad. There is a brief excursion from 1983 back to 1950, that while necessary is definitely a pacing-killer. Ragnar's books aren't tearaway action plots. In this dual-timeline story, the pace is of necessity slower as there is much to relearn about the old killing. Helgi is a character who listens more than he talks. That won't work well for all readers but does for me.

Why I'm missing a star from the review is simple. There's a kind of coda on the ending that...annoyed me. You'll see, but maybe won't agree with me that it was an unnecessary add-on to a really absorbing, involving read.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

WHITEOUT
RAGNAR JÓNASSON (tr. Quentin Bates)
Orenda Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When the body of a young woman is found dead beneath the cliffs of the deserted Icelandic village of Kálfshamarvík, police officer Ari Thór Arason uncovers a startling and terrifying connection to an earlier series of deaths, as the killer remains on the loose...

Two days before Christmas, a young woman is found dead beneath the cliffs of the deserted village of Kálfshamarvík.

Did she jump, or did something more sinister take place beneath the lighthouse and the abandoned old house on the remote rocky outcrop?

With winter closing in and the snow falling relentlessly, Ari Thór Arason discovers that the victim's mother and young sister also lost their lives in this same spot, twenty-five years earlier.

As the dark history and its secrets of the village are unveiled, and the death toll begins to rise, the Siglufjordur detectives must race against the clock to find the killer, before another tragedy takes place.

Dark, chilling and complex, Whiteout is a haunting, atmospheric and stunningly plotted thriller from one of Iceland's bestselling crime writers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Ari Thór is very much the center of the action here; I tell you that because this page is dedicated to the latest series-starrer Helgi Reykdal. He appears in this book, so I'm not just being capricious.

Ari Thór is asked by Tómas, now a superintending detective from Reykjavík, formerly Ari Thór's boss, to be on the team investigating this crime. Helgi, as a UK-trained criminologist, is on it too, in a less visible capacity than Ari Thór. The basic mystery is why the young victim, raised in this now-abandoned village, is there dead in the same place her mother and sister were each found dead not all that long ago.

Family secrets, societal ills, the usual suspects...and speaking of suspects you'll know who committed the crime quite soon, if you're at all experienced in the ways of crime fiction. That said, the real reason to read the story is the wonderfully evocative writing, a setting both familiar...what genre reader hasn't read at least one Icelandic mystery in 2025?...and foreign enough to give one the frisson of difference from one's surroundings. The seasonality is very much a part of the appeal as well. It's close to Yule, and cold...Iceland, remember...and full of little sidebars about rituals (Jólabókaflóð!) and legends that both inform the action and involve the reader. This reader, anyway. I'm not sure if I like Ari Thór as much as Helgi from the later books, but they're both unrepentant bookwyrms: “The usual magnificent tree stood in the center of the Town Hall Square. The people of Siglufjordur were quietly getting ready for the holiday...with evening mass at the old church and then dinner and unwrapping of presents, followed by what in Ari Thór’s mind was one of the most important Christmas Eve traditions of all—the reading of a book well into the night.”

My homie, is Ari Thór. Yours too, I suspect, if you're reading this. I haven't seen Ari Thór since I took up with the more cinnamon-bun-y Helgi, but both are deeply convinced readers, so either is welcome. There's a condign resolution to this tragedy, and there's the satisfying sense of ma'at being served in faraway Iceland that now feels more like a home-from-home than a strange Norse myth of a country.

Starting your acquaintance with Ragnar's world right here is no bad thing. What you don't already know is gently explained to you. The ending might be a bit...pat...for some readers, including me, but be patient and pursue the series. It does make sense. Remember Ragnar is writing in a storyverse that just happens to be set in a real country, and enjoy the tidbits.

ALAIN MABANCKOU'S PAGE: THE LIGHTS OF POINTE-NOIRE, a memoir of home going; & BLACK MOSES, multiple legends remixed

THE LIGHTS OF POINTE-NOIRE
ALAIN MABANCKOU (tr. Helen Stevenson)
The New Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzling meditation on home-coming and belonging from one of "Africa's greatest writers" (The Guardian) and the Man Booker International Prize finalist and Grand Prize Winner at the 2015 French Voices Awards

Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989, at the age of twenty-two, not to return until a quarter of a century later. When he finally came back to Pointe-Noire, a bustling port town on the Congo's southwestern coast, he found a country that in some ways had changed beyond recognition: The cinema where, as a child, Mabanckou gorged on glamorous American culture had become a Pentecostal church, and his secondary school has been renamed in honor of a previously despised colonial ruler.

But many things remain unchanged, not least the swirling mythology of Congolese culture that still informs everyday life in Pointe-Noire. Now a decorated writer and an esteemed professor at UCLA, Mabanckou finds he can only look on as an outsider in the place where he grew up. As he delves into his childhood, into the life of his departed mother, and into the strange mix of belonging and absence that informs his return to the Republic of the Congo, his work recalls the writing of V. S. Naipaul and André Aciman, offering a startlingly fresh perspective on the pain of exile, the ghosts of memory, and the paths we take back home.

"This is a beautiful book, the past hauntingly reentered, the present truthfully faced, and the translation rises gorgeously to the challenge." —Salman Rushdie

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My Review: "You can't go home again," in the truly deathless formulation of justly neglected writer Thomas Wolfe. It is the reason the memoir exists. Humans need frameworks, limits on their sense of their life. Our brains are pattern-making and storytelling machines. It's a survival tactic..."is that weird shadow a tree in the moonlight or a predator?" kept your ancestors alive. Author Mabanckou, not a lot younger than I am, felt the need to reckon with Home in a story. Well, what do you expect from a prolific novelist and poet who makes his living from teaching UCLA students about literature?

In just about two hundred pages, he tells us the story of his two-week return to Pointe-Noire, left twenty-five years ago so of course much changed. In the course of returning, the emigrant/exile/fugitive from home will notice the many changes time has wrought. I expect almost all of us, whether we left our hometowns or home countries or not, can relate to the "OMG the old {thing} is now {opposite thing}!" internal conversation. Not that many of us use that near-universal experience to relive and explain our upbringing to others. Author Mabanckou tells us of his family, how they moved to the city of Pointe-Noire on the Congolese coast from a small village in pursuit of safety and opportuunity. The manner of family order is something US families could definitely learn from. No child is more attended to, more broadly exposed to the worldviews of others, than those raised as he was in his mother's extended family. The family moved, not just his mother and stepfather, so she was not stranded in a new city, left to her own devices to raise and support her child.

Compare and contrast, y'all.

Thinking back to my childhood, when we hid in the lantana fields near the Agostinho Neto airport and hunted iridescent beetles or fished for minnows from the banks of the River Tchinouka, I replied to my friend, with his "Parisian Negro" arrogance:

"These children aren’t in a paradise of poverty. Here, look at the photo: that tire, those flip-flops…that’s what makes them happy…flip-flops to walk in, the tire they can all climb aboard like a motorbike big enough to carry all their wildest dreams. Every day my nephews and nieces walk out in a long line down the rue du Louboulou. Their childhood knits them together, they wouldn’t swap it for all the world. They drink from a small glass, but it’s their own. Your glass is big, but it’s not yours, and each time you want to drink from it, you have to ask for permission."

Growing up in a time and place where your assumptions are formed in a conversation with the assumptions of others, all of whom possess a stake in your life, is a beginning to be envied, to be emulated; it results in a less monadic, less greedy, less needy life as an adult. Author Mabanckou has lived in Europe and the US for decades, he knows the issues and differences that monadic living brings because he was raised outside them.

Thinking of home as he returns to the place where it was allows him to give us twenty-five separate récits we'll agree to call chapters. In his head with him, we look into his past with a fond eye, seeing ghosts of places and of lives we once fully filled but now can't do more than tell stories to an audience about. It's part of getting old. It's part of defining yourself for yourself. it's part of accepting what some simply can not: Some of us are outsiders by nature. Author Mabanckou, in leaving Pointe-Noire then returning after a life away from it, embraced the outsider role. Many of the best storytellers do.

What struck me forcibly was the absence of any explanation, or hint of a reason, why he did not go home for a quarter-century. I thought it might have to do with the familial expectations that this "rich" relative would be able to (and willing to) give them a lot of material security. The way he navigated expectations and demands is the matter of the second half of the book. It was perhaps more important to Author Mabanckou than to me, but it was not a very involving way to end a very short tale in my opinion.

Hence the lack of a fifth star for this very well-written, very interesting story.

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BLACK MOSES
ALAIN MABANCKOU (tr. Helen Stevenson)
The New Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017

It's 1970, and in the People's Republic of Congo a Marxist-Leninist revolution is ushering in a new age. But over at the orphanage on the outskirts of Pointe-Noire where young Moses has grown up, the revolution has only strengthened the reign of terror of Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako, the institution's corrupt director.

So Moses escapes to Pointe-Noire, where he finds a home with a larcenous band of Congolese Merry Men and among the Zairian prostitutes of the Trois-Cents quarter. But the authorities won't leave Moses in peace, and intervene to chase both the Merry Men and the Trois-Cents girls out of town. All this injustice pushes poor Moses over the edge. Could he really be the Robin Hood of the Congo? Or is he just losing his marbles?

Black Moses is a larger-than-life comic tale of a young man obsessed with helping the helpless in an unjust world. It is also a vital new extension of Mabanckou's extraordinary, interlinked body of work dedicated to his native Congo, and confirms his status as one of our great storytellers.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Congolese Oliver Twist-cum-Count of Monte Cristo tale of life's many injustices, prejudices, and petty grudges.

It all began when I was a teenager, and came to wonder about the name I' d been given by Papa Moupelo, the priest at the orphanage in Loango: Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko. A long name, which in Lingala means: "Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors" as it still inscribed on my birth certificate today.

Moses begins his tale in the truly out-Dickensing Dickens orphanage where tribal violence has landed him. Growing weary of life under the ever-more-crushing thumb of Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako (whose first name is the bitterly ironic French for "God's Gift") he makes his escape to the big city of Pointe-Noire (see memoir above for its first appearance here). The reasons Moses, who hates his name, runs away is to escape Dieudonné's revolutionary Marxist-Leninist insistence that people are machines to be programmed, not souls to be nurtured; and thus need no kindness or guidance but just rote training. Where better to demonstrate the effectiveness of this than an orphanage?

Shedding his awful life and assuming a new name, "Black Pepper," does not stop Moses' apparent destiny from hounding him. Throughout this short...under two hundred pages...novel (maybe a novella, but a fairly borderline case if so), he is hounded by Dieudonné and his cadres. It cannot be allowed for someone to resist the Revolution! Isn't it funny how very much the high-control cultures of religion and revolution resemble each other? Almost like they're really the same thing, only in different suits.

The major issue in reading about Moses is that he spends at least half the book in Dieudonné's clutches being tormented, then after escaping (with his twin tormentors, having survived their hazing and gained their respect thereby), we get less of his Pointe-Noire exploits than necessary for us to invest in him as a full character before he unravels psychologically (surprise! not) and we get a cursory account of that causal event. His healing journey takes him through folk medicine to Western psychiatry, both getting deeply disrespectful narrative treatment.

Animal harm is done. Be warned.

The parable in all this appears to me to be the Dickensian nature of the revolution against the horrors of colonialism. We follow the hapless chaff that is Moses/Pepper as the forces of Control use their notable supply of zeal to oppress and destroy what resists their efforts finally succeeds. It is short, so perhaps there was too much story for too few pages...? I'll read Author Mabanckou's writing as translated by Helen Stevenson for a lot longer than this took.

A story that resonates in times gone fascist more than when I first read it in 2017.

SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO, so very timely; so very deep; not very lovable

SYMPATHY TOWER TOKYO
RIE QUDAN (tr. Jesse Kirkwood)
Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The award-winning, bestselling Japanese phenomenon: a speculative, prophetic novel following a young and brilliant celebrity architect in Tokyo who takes on her most controversial project yet—perfect for readers of Klara and the Sun and Chain-Gang All-Stars.

Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of radical sympathy toward criminals has become normalized. The incarcerated are considered victims influenced by their environments to commit crime and are labeled accordingly as Homo miserabilis.

A grand, yet controversial, skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house lawbreakers in compassionate comfort—Sympathy Tower Tokyo. Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city’s new centerpiece but is filled with doubt. Haunted by a terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might inherently disagree with the values of the project, which should be the pinnacle of her career. As Sara grapples with these conflicting emotions, her relationship with her gorgeous—and much younger—boyfriend grows increasingly strained. In search of solace and in need of creative inspiration, Sara turns to the knowing words of an AI chatbot…

The recipient of Japan’s highest literary prize, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is an extraordinary novel from one of the most exciting new global voices. Partly inspired by conversations with an artificial intelligence, it offers an urgent and brilliant defense of the power of language written by humans, a moving exploration of the imaginative impulse, and an often hilarious send-up of our modern world’s unrelenting conformity.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Short, intense, very very Japanese.

What do I mean by that?

This I liked less—his tendency to mansplain things I hadn't actually asked about. Was his smooth, polite facade really just an attempt to mask his greatest flaw—that he was, at heart, illiterate? For all his computational might, it seemed Al-built didn't have the strength to face up to his own weakness. He'd become so used to stealing the words of others without repercussion that he felt no shame, had no awareness even, of his own ignorance. The question of how humans had learned to use the word "discrimination," of the ordeals that had led us to it and which of us had suffered through them, was of no interest to him. He was incapable of curiosity. He did not thirst for knowledge.

"He", as you might surmise from context, is an LLM, or as we persist in calling them, an "AI", which does not exist...yet. There was a kerfuffle about the author using AI in writing a novel largely about AI that even the usually sensible Guardian sensationalized. Well, having read the piece at the link, the reasoning for doing what she did makes sense to me, and the hype likely did no harm to her sales. Not that this was likely...the deeply prestigious Akutagawa Prize gave this story its nod (and a million yen) in 2023. The Prize has gone to some excellent works available in English (see the list at the link) so I feel little concern for this affecting Rie Qudan's career taking off into the stratosphere.

Should it have done?

Sympathy Tower Tokyo would throw our language into disarray; it would tear the world apart. Not because, dizzy with our architectural prowess, we had reached too close to heaven and enraged the gods, but because we had begun to abuse language, to bend and stretch and break it as we each saw fit, so that before long no one could understand what anyone else was saying.

I think this novel's premise...what the hell do we do about AI in regard to the needs of humans...is not only timely but the angle chosen is so perfectly suited to my concerns it's like she got it from my head. I am, in other words, The Platonic Ideal of her reader. Sara Machina has my sympathetic attention from jump. She's ambitious, intellectually curious, and has strong opinions about language, its use, and its power.

Also, her boyfriend is gorgeous and twenty-five years younger than she is.

You go, girl.

Sara is, in this book-2026, in a different world from ours but only just. It's clear that the author chose to differentiate book-Tokyo from ours enough to enable we-the-readers to feel our real feelings but not pour them over, or incorporate them into, out-of-book reality. Sara's designing the titular structure, a prison-cum-asylum, and is conflicted about its kindly parameters versus its actual intent. (The synopsis clarifies this if you have not read it yet.) Sara also has some extremely Japanese concerns that require significant explanation to the US reader, regarding Japanese writing: transliterating foreign language is usually done using sound-characters called "katakana" to mimic the sound of the foreign word, instead of the Chinese import ideograms called "kanji".

Many are the switched-off brains, reaching absently for the browser tab next in line. I want you to know that it's not just fuss-and-feathers preciousness. It genuinely adds a layer of understanding to the heart of the book, the need to use language in ways appropriate to a given task; to use language as a human, conveying layer after layer of meaning, commentary, information plus context, all very much at the heart of Large Language Models and their masquerade as Artificial General Intelligence. The AGI you hear so much about is not there yet, it's still LLM, and see the first quote for why that very much matters in 2025. The algorithms are very sophisticated, the processing power is behind their use is *staggering* but generative and creative is not available. Yet.

Quite a lot of this read was only subtly conveyed. I went off to do research after it, because my spidey-senses told me there was a lot more to this than meets the eye. There was. Do I think that will give everyone the pleasure in poking around the internet that it did me? No. Will the read be as pleasant for those less thirsty for data than I am? Yes. The bone of speculative storytelling that pokes through is more than involving enough, the parallels among all the ways humans create, use, abuse the structures they create to help, harm, hurt, elucidate...all readily available without digging any deeper than the text.

I don't know if large numbers of speculative fiction/alternate-history readers will cotton on to those elements thus find the book; others put off by those elements will see them clearly and not like that they weren't informed they were in for that. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics occurring on schedule will throw some. A few will see the Zaha Hadid connection without prompting, but I was not one; I wish I had known in advance because I'm a giant nerd and would've savored the effect of that knowledge on my read. The in-text mentions of her sent me searching; better I should've had an endnote.

So you see why I gave no fifth star. I'm glad I read the book; I think it deserved the Akutagawa Prize; the way the author used Chat to enhance the text fails to rouse my readily roused ire should say a lot; but in the end I think this is a read I admired more than loved.

ANTOINE LAURAIN'S PAGE: THE PORTRAIT, firstborn fiction by the author; & FRENCH RHAPSODY, meditation on Les Jadis and how much today is the same

FRENCH RHAPSODY
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Emily Boyce & Jane Aitken)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: Middle-aged doctor Alain Massoulier has received a life-changing letter—thirty-three years too late.

Lost in the Paris postal system for decades, the letter from Polydor, dated 1983, offers a recording contract to The Holograms, in which Alain played lead guitar. Back then The Holograms had believed in their cutting-edge sound. However, the music industry remained indifferent, and eventually the band split up, each going their own way.

Alain is overcome by nostalgia, and is tempted to track down the members of the group. But in a world where everything and everyone has changed . . . where will his quest take him?

Antoine Laurain's new novel combines his trademark charm with a satirical take on modern France.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Republication of these titles comes after Gallic Books' acquisition by Pushkin Press is picking up steam. I'm all over it, I loved Gallic Books and am (obviously) fond of Pushkin Press (and imprints).

In this rather odd tale, we go down the rabbit hole of missed chances. Every person this accident of fate changed came under Author Laurain's scrutiny in separate chapters, with life stories and so on. It made for nice reading...but what was I supposed to get from these stories? I know them but possess no framework to see what I'm to make of the fates of the post-The Holograms members. Maybe I'm insufficiently au fait with modern French society to get the full import of the meaning.

That said, I really resonated to the right-wing politician's trajectory, he who was the bassist. I've forgotten his name because I despise his politics (and his screed-spouting lectures) and, like Endora from Bewitched, I forget the names of those I dislike. Nonetheless, I thought it was very interesting to read about whatsisname's trajectory. How he got into it, what he does...all very timely. Especially for a book first published in 2015....

The others stuck with me less but were absorbing enough that I kept picking the book up to read more every time I put something else down. A clutter of wacky neighbors and hero's-journey cicerones detract from the central story's momentum, none of whom end up making a real difference. I found the ending...pat.

So I'm rating it only a tad under four stars. I got chuckles, I got angry mutterings, but I never got bored. That, my olds, is worth a lot in a literary month cram-jam full of heaps of nothing interesting.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE PORTRAIT
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Emily Boyce & Jane Aitken)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A Parisian antiques collector finds himself in a case of mistaken identity after buying a portrait which curiously resembles him

While wandering through a Paris auction house, avid collector Pierre-François Chaumont is stunned to discover the eighteenth-century portrait of an unknown man who looks just like him. Much to his delight, Chaumont's bid for the work is successful, but back at home his jaded wife and circle of friends are unable to see the resemblance. Chaumont remains convinced of it, and as he researches into the painting's history, he is presented with the opportunity to abandon his tedious existence and walk into a brand new life.

Chaumont needs a fresh start—he and his wife fell out of love long ago, and the only thing that holds meaning for him anymore is his search for perfect objects. But this portrait is more than just a painting. The first night he owns it, Pierre-François dreams of another life, lived as the Comte de Mandragore, in a rural chateau, with a beautiful young wife. Awaking from the dream he’s determined to find this place—but it will take all his collector’s avidity, ingenuity, and unscrupulousness to make it his own. And when he finally has the chance to do so, will he be willing to pay the price to make it last?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Republication of these titles comes after Gallic Books' acquisition by Pushkin Press is picking up steam. I'm all over it, I loved Gallic Books and am (obviously) fond of Pushkin Press (and imprints).

This is the novella that started it all. Told in first-person, it's as immediate as a récit but takes place outside the narrator's skull, so it's not one. It's a sweetly-smiling stab at modern greed, the lust for Stuff that fills the gaping emotional holes in many modern people.

There's a sharp edge here, a flensing eye that spares no one...the unloved, unloving wife, their circle of "friends", the man himself...no one looks all that good under the pithy judgment of Author Laurain:

Modern eyes? They have no soul; they no longer look up to heaven. Even the most pure are only concerned with the immediate. Vulgar lust, petty self-interest, greed, vanity, prejudice, cowardly appetites and envy. Those are the abominable emotions swarming in today’s eyes. We have the souls of notaries and cooks. That’s why the eyes on the portraits in museums are so spectacular; they reflect prayers and tortures, regrets and remorse.

What a pompous peroration! What a quiet proof that simply being misunderstood and softly maligned does not equal being Right.

It's an afternoon's read. It will keep you involved if, like me, you think Stuff is an addiction that speaks more loudly about what it is...about greedily stuffing yourself...than what it isn't...a fulfilling and worthwhile use of you one wild and precious life (that endlessly apt and beautiful phrase from Mary Oliver).

I think it's evident it's a first work, the sheer improbability of the plot is up there with Thorne Smith that whole school of magical objects that open portals from modern to ancient (ot just other) times. The characters are, as is almost inevitable in novellas, not developed beyond the necessity of moving the plot forward.

It's a pleasant and worthwile read. Maybe don't hunt for it everywhere, but if you have the budget and the device, download it of a dull Sunday afternoon to enjoy its real pleasures.