Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  Forgottenness, by Tanja Maljartschuk, translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins (Liveright). This thoughtful novel connects two characters separated by a century: a present-day Ukrainian writer and the twentieth-century Polish Ukrainian nationalist Viacheslav Lypynskyi. In one thread, Maljartschuk plumbs Lypynskyi’s incendiary biography: born a Polish aristocrat, he served as a diplomat for the nascent Ukrainian state before living in exile when the Soviets took over. In another, the contemporary writer revisits her failed love affairs, and her grandparents’ experiences in the famine of 1932-33. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Baumgartner, by Paul Auster (Grove). The center of this slender, ruminative novel is Sy Baumgartner, an author and a professor who, at seventy, has been mourning his wife’s sudden death for nearly ten years. As Baumgartner struggles to make sense of this chapter of his life, he starts dating, and he devotes himself to a new book, “a serio-comic, quasi-fictional discourse on the self in relation to other selves.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The Genius of Their Age, by S. Frederick Starr (Oxford). Ibn Sina and Biruni, two polymaths born in the late tenth century, were giants of the Islamic Golden Age, producing groundbreaking findings in mathematics, science, and philosophy. Both men were from what is now Uzbekistan, and both drew from Aristotle, but this engaging history uncovers their differences, in temperament and in scholarly approach. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster). In this memoir, a former linguist for the U.S. military, who monitored suspected Taliban communications in Afghanistan, gathering information that determined the people American soldiers would kill, reflects on his deployment. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment