5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Our five-alarm fire of fabulous reviews this week includes Aminata Forna on André Aciman’s Roman Year, Christine Smallwood on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Third Realm, Lily Meyer on Dinaw Mengestu’s Someone Like Us, Casey Cep on Hahrie Han’s Undivided, and Alana Pockros on Emily Witt’s Health and Safety.

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“About a third of the way through André Aciman’s Roman Year—an account of the time his family spent there when he was 16, exiled from his native Egypt for being Jewish—an uncle visits from New York, looks around the former brothel that is the Acimans’ new apartment and immediately urges them to move to America. ‘I wonder why it had never occurred to me,’ Aciman writes, ‘or for that matter to either of my parents, that ours was not a life.’ At its heart, this memoir is a search for that life from the limbo of dislocation…

Central to this adaptation, and to Aciman’s evolving identity, is language. His family has fled so many wars and pogroms, has rebuilt their lives so many times, that between them they speak French, Arabic, Greek, Turkish, German, Italian and Ladino (the language of Sephardic Jews)…

Aciman evokes the passing of time in rich, meandering prose, rebuilding 1960s Rome in sentences suffused with light and sound and memories—the taste of an artichoke, the smell of bergamot and of Crêpe de Chine perfume. From the bewilderment of arrival, the young Aciman moves through denial toward a gradual acceptance of his new life. Roman Year is both an affecting coming-of-age story and a timely, distinctive description of the haunted lives of refugees.”

–Aminata Forna on André Aciman’s Roman Year (The New York Times Book Review)

“At their best, the Morning Star books ask profound and troubling questions about the scope of human knowledge and create a potent climate of trepidation and anxiety. But at their worst, they are bloated and sloppy, overstuffed with theme and burdened by tedious and banal dialogue. Across some two thousand pages—that’s not counting the fourth volume, not yet translated—they generate suspense and defer resolving it, which could be interesting but in practice is simultaneously irritating and enervating. Knausgaard has a hypnotist’s ability to entrance, but The Wolves of Eternity is one of the sloggiest swamps I’ve ever trudged through. I wanted so badly to give up. By the end of The Third Realm I felt smothered by the monstrous bagginess of the enterprise. It was simply too much book. I am all for literature that refuses the demand to entertain, that attends to the useless and leftover, that scoffs at being ‘taut’ or efficient. But there is waste in the sense of glorious excess and extravagance, and then there is wasting someone’s time…

It cannot be easy to write anything after My Struggle. As Tim Parks noted a decade ago in these pages, it wasn’t even easy to finish the series. The Knausgaard who wrote the later volumes was a different Knausgaard—fame and the pressures of publishing, speaking, and being hailed as a genius were bound to transform the life of the artist as well as his project. He deserves credit for venturing into new territories. And yet, despite the seeming differences between the Morning Star series and My Struggle, the problem may be that he has not ventured far enough—not gone deep enough into the horror that he peeks at before turning away.

Perhaps all will be revealed in time. I don’t intend to find out. It may be that the Morning Star series is a victim of its early achievement: the first volume was so successful at making me acknowledge my own death that I resented spending my life with what came next. Knausgaard seems to be under the impression that a reader will follow him down all highways and byways, willing to travel indefinitely to no clear destination. A writer who expects that kind of faith has gone from being interested in God to playing God.

–Christine Smallwood on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Third Realm (The New York Review of Books)

“As a Washingtonian, I would say you can’t understand my hometown without reading [Edward P.] Jones, nor can you understand it without reading Dinaw Mengestu’s 2007 debut, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, a piercing story of dislocation set in a then rapidly gentrifying section of Northwest D.C…

Someone Like Us is an exploration of grief, inheritance, and addiction—and, like The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, of dislocation. But whereas Stephanos pursued connection in the earlier novel, Mamush is afraid of it. Mengestu traces that fear through Mamush’s history, using place to get deeper into the mind of a character who won’t engage in self-examination. He writes the D.C. suburbs as a cascade of anodyne buildings whose lack of identifying detail becomes a blueprint for the way Mamush wants to live. Mamush is in search of the comfort of placelessness—but as Mengestu knows, there’s no such thing…

So much of the fiction set in D.C. paints it too broadly, treating it as a symbol of power rather than a real, living city. In The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, Mengestu wrote it as a place of small, stubborn, damaged hopes. Someone Like Us revisits and revises that understanding. Its D.C. is a whole world, layered with crisis, rejuvenation, and heartbreak. We see this in Someone Like Us’s span of decades, in its geographical expanse: Where The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears took place over a year on one block, the newer novel sprawls through time and space, reaching through the suburbs that are so dull in Mamush’s imagination, so full in Samuel’s.

These competing images of the same place—a place rarely seen for what it is, or for who really lives there—are the book’s essence. No town, no building, and no person can be as empty of detail as Mamush wants. Samuel’s ghost won’t permit it. Nor will Mengestu. At the novel’s very end, Mamush sends Hannah a text that is at once customarily oblique and a promise that detail is coming, that he’s going to start filling in the blanks. It’s a gesture not quite of hope—Mamush isn’t there yet—but of resistance to hopelessness. Mengestu, once again, is writing against the void.”

–Lily Meyer on Dinaw Mengestu’s Someone Like Us (The New Republic)

“When it comes to Christianity, scale often matters: the larger the data set, the worse the outlook on any number of axes, from membership to charitable giving, while the more anecdotal the account, the better things seem..Undivided is neither an academic book nor a big-idea book; it’s a short, sensitive account of four congregants in a single church in Cincinnati…

Curious how organizers sold the majority-white municipality on a tax levy that would most benefit Black residents, Han began interviewing those organizers and quickly heard about an evangelical church that had rallied hundreds of volunteers to register voters, knock on doors, and phone-bank for the initiative. She then spent another seven years talking with Crossroads members about their faith and activism.

“Undivided is a careful, close study of just a few of those members. Four, of course, is barely a mustard seed when compared with the more than two hundred million Americans who identify as Christian, and Han makes no claim for statistical significance, not even among Crossroads members. She does, however, make a bolder claim about how the statistical insignificance of these four subjects—as joiners in an age of social isolation, as evangelical Christians with a passion for racial justice, as interracial collaborators committed to mutual understanding—just might be relevant to the rest of us.”

–Casey Cep on Hahrie Han’s Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church (The New Yorker)

“At first, Health and Safety appears to be, like Future Sex, an entertaining, provocative, first-person reported book about the subcultures surrounding a recreational activity. Health and Safety is not quite the scientific and cultural history that Michael Pollan offered in How to Change Your Mind; nor is it as experimental as fellow raver McKenzie Wark’s Raving, an informal, sometimes diaristic book that explains what it feels like to stave off gender dysphoria by letting loose on the dance floor. Witt has written something more expansive, borrowing elements of both genres. It is both a researched history of drugs and electronic music and a firsthand account of consumption and escapism. But it’s also an exploration of how one squares extended periods of partying with an otherwise conventional adult life—with its commitments to long-term partnership and full-time work.

While Witt’s work sometimes covers the culture of drugs and dancing, she has also reported on pressing social and political issues: school shootings, police brutality, the alt-right. That work turns Health and Safety intosomething much more complex than a meditation on dancing and drugs. Namely, it is a book concerned with how people express their political frustration; how they take it out on others, and how they channel it into their everyday lives and personal relationships…

…Health and Safety does not attempt to define stability, health, or safety. Rather the book is about striving for all those states of being in a tumultuous, difficult, and violent period. Dancing on drugs for 15 hours at a time may seem to some an irresponsible way to deal with reality. But when you revisit those unpredictable and dangerous moments of lockdown, the nightlife scene starts to look like one of the few places that still made sense.”

–Alana Pockros on Emily Witt’s Health and Safety: A Breakdown (The New Republic)