Despite one’s aspirations to another kind of reality, for Pierre Reverdy one is forced to return to one’s fetters.
Book Review: “Eve out of her Ruins” — Mauritian Realities
It would be a mistake to call the absorbing Eve out of her Ruins a mystery novel.
Book Review: Getting coupled and uncoupled — Emmanuelle Pagano’s Mini-Studies of Love
A perspicacious, multifarious, and compelling fictional field report on how we get hitched or unhitched, coupled or uncoupled.
Book Review: “Cockroaches” — A Gruesome Story, Memorably Told
Scholastique Mukasonga’s autobiography, Cockroaches, examines the three decades leading up to the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda.
Book Review: “France: Story of a Childhood” — A Timely Memoir of Liberation
France: Story of a Childhood is half personal essay, half autobiographical novel.
Book Review: Dangerous Delusional Illusions — “A Cage in Search of a Bird”
An absorbing and disturbing novel that explores the dangerous turns that erotomania can take.
Book Review: Marguerite Duras’ “Abahn Sabana David” — A Rush Job
Did Marguerite Duras, who had worked in the French résistance during the war, feel guilty about not having been sufficiently concerned about the Shoah?
Book Review: Incurable Absences — Olivia Rosenthal’s novel about Alzheimer’s and Much More
The author makes fully human an illness marked by absence and estrangement from humanity.
Book Review: Antoine Volodine’s “Bardo or Not Bardo” — Seriously Spoofing the Afterlife
One reads this strangely engaging book, like Volodine’s others, with a sort of knitted-brow amusement.
Book Review: Mathematicians in Combat — Michèle Audin’s “One Hundred Twenty-One Days”
Audin scrutinizes political commitment when it is undertaken by representatives of an intellectual discipline detached from the real world.