December 10, 2017

From The TLS (Margaret Drabble on Books of the Year 2017):

Margherita Giacobino’s Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter (Dedalus; translated by Judith Landry) tells the story of a Piedmontese family from a village in the foothills of the Alps, 30 kilometres from Turin. Part memoir and part fiction, it covers the twentieth century, and evokes lives emerging from rural poverty to the affluence of the 1950s, from a diet of polenta and maggoty chestnuts where bread is a luxury to canned vegetables and refrigerators, from goatherding and wool carding to factory work and shopkeeping. Giacobino, now an academic specializing in gender studies, pieces together her ancestry from dourly posed photographs and anecdotes and shipping registers, with a focus on her hardworking great-aunt, the strong woman of the tribe. It’s like a rural version of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan saga: this family, like Ferrante’s, spoke dialect, not Italian. It’s a powerful and atmospheric record of largely unexplored terrain.

From The Guardian (Gordon Brown on Best Books of 2017):

Spending much of the year writing a book of my own has left me with a deeper and more personal understanding – and sympathy for – the challenges confronting authors. In fiction, I was impressed but challenged by the originality and scope of George Saunders’s Booker-winning story of grief and empathy, Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury) and enjoyed Ali Smith’s Autumn (Hamish Hamilton) (and now look forward to her Winter), but I would opt for John le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (Viking), not least for Smiley’s dramatic and surprising closing revelation of his reason for a life-time of spying – and lying. In autobiography, Nelson Mandela’s Dare Not Linger (with Mandla Langa, Macmillan) cannot rival Long Walk to Freedom – he died with it unfinished – but it reveals the struggles, setbacks and frustrations that to this very day thwart the progress of Africa. And Branko Milanović’s much underestimated Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Harvard), now being published in many languages, tells us more than any other recent book about the state of the world we live in and, at a time when hope is so urgently needed, offers us thought-provoking insights into the world we could become.

From The New York Times (on Rachel Seiffert's A Boy in Winter):

Seiffert’s intricate novel probes the bonds and betrayals in a Ukrainian town as it succumbs to Hitler.

From The Economist:

Crises often come when an unforeseen but otherwise survivable investor panic becomes self-fulfilling. Knowing when the world will flit between states is impossible.

From The New Yorker:

[Only] by having a deep local sense of place can one have a larger loyalty that contains within it the necessary contradictions and limits...