Issyvoo

That The Tiger’s Wife never slips entirely into magical realism is part of its magic—its agile play with tragic material and with us—because, despite Natalia and her grandfather’s devotion to science and rationality, this is a story that bleeds into fable with the slightest scratch.

But stop with the complaints! The point to remember is that Freedom is big enough and thoughtful enough to engage and irritate an enormous number of readers…

All but the most severely self-loathing Jews will grow weary of Jacobson’s badgering parody of self-loathing Jews. And the plot frequently gives way to lectures, discussions and set pieces that could be read in almost any order.

For all of its many layers, however, this is a book wholly centered on love and our desperate need to make sense of it. Like Kemal’s instinct to pilfer Füsun’s trifles, the human impulse is to grasp at love, as if it could be a concrete thing held by fingers.

…The Tin Drum mixes fantasy, gallows humor, several pathetic love stories, a tragic family saga, a classic bildungsroman and a powerful account of how great political events affect—usually disastrously—a small group of ordinary people. It grabs your attention from the very first words: “Granted: I’m an inmate in a mental institution… .”

The present-tense narrative thrusts us into history, not as a stately procession of inevitable events, but a dynamic process shaped by an unstable agglomeration of individual wills, mass movements and random chance.

The novel opens on a world that seems to have been demolished by the psychopaths of McCarthy’s earlier fiction…

The manner in which everyone’s miseries converge and nullify one another is what defines The Brooklyn Follies, ultimately, as a comedy.

In terms of popular fiction, Kerr’s Germany is as searing a portrait of hell on Earth as we are likely to see.