The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Gonçalo M. Tavares' A Man: Klaus Klump -- the first in his 'Kingdom'-tetralogy, but the last to make it into English.
Joseph Walser's Machine still seems to me the highpoint of the quartet, but all of Tavares' work is worth engaging with. It's certainly an exemplar of un- (in the sense of '(very) not') American writing: political, but not in a way much American fiction approaches politics (this particular one struck me as particularly in the Brecht-mold, and as Michael Hofmann just pointed out in a TLS-review of a new Brecht biography, Americans don't really do (or get) Brecht) and making no real effort to 'win over' the reader (something that American writers can't seem to avoid trying to do).
As Saramago noted a while back, Tavares (b.1970) is a talent to keep an eye on.
Joseph Walser's Machine still seems to me the highpoint of the quartet, but all of Tavares' work is worth engaging with. It's certainly an exemplar of un- (in the sense of '(very) not') American writing: political, but not in a way much American fiction approaches politics (this particular one struck me as particularly in the Brecht-mold, and as Michael Hofmann just pointed out in a TLS-review of a new Brecht biography, Americans don't really do (or get) Brecht) and making no real effort to 'win over' the reader (something that American writers can't seem to avoid trying to do).
As Saramago noted a while back, Tavares (b.1970) is a talent to keep an eye on.