Books reviewed in The Atlantic in 2008
Fiction | Biography | Current Events | History | Society & Culture

Paradiso, by Dante Alighieri; a verse translation by Rober Hollander and Jean Hollander (Doubleday)
("Cover to Cover," April 2008)

"Translating Dante’s Commedia has been something of a cottage industry among poets in the United States. This now-completed translation by the Hollanders, with Dante’s Italian on the facing pages, will very likely be the most enduring, both as a literary achievement and for its commentaries essential for 21st-century readers."

.....

The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, edited, Introduced, and Annotated by Maria Tatar; Translated by Maria Tatar and Julie K. Allen (Norton)
("Cover to Cover," March 2008)

"In this lavishly illustrated and still more copiously annotated volume, the Harvard professor and noted folklorist Tatar—who has written authoritatively on fairy tales as a genre and on the Grimm Brothers in particular—presents Andersen as a figure just as valuable for adults as for children. She’s an excellent guide to the lesser-known stories here, but equally adept when taking a fresh look at such beloved classics as 'The Emperor’s New Clothes,' 'The Ugly Duckling,' and 'The Red Shoes,' all in splendid new translations."

.....

The Soul Thief, by Charles Baxter (Pantheon)
("Cover to Cover," May 2008)

"Baxter’s vivid characters and their particular milieus—barefoot graduate students in early-'70s Buffalo, for instance, or the desk clerk in a familiar Sunset Strip hotel, or the suburban father of two teenage boys—exemplify the most rewarding form of realism. His scenes are so acutely observed and so fluidly presented that to read them is to live them, but with far more sensitivity and insight than anyone can bring to real life."

.....

The Silver Swan, by Benjamin Black (Henry Holt)
("Cover to Cover," June 2008)

"It’s not just the tough-but-tender protagonist, the brutal milieu, and the hard-boiled dames—there’s something about the murky atmosphere of that damp, decaying city that lets it all flourish."

.....

His Illegal Self, by Peter Carey (Knopf)
("Cover to Cover," March 2008)

"This time he tells his story from the point of view of 7-year-old Che, the child of fugitive '60s Harvard radicals. Carey uses the third person, but is nonetheless strikingly effective in getting into the boy’s mind and heart. The strong, direct prose—particularly the dialogue, spoken and unspoken—is equally attractive, and just right for this picaresque, hard-boiled yet uplifting tale."

.....

The Rain Before It Falls, by Jonathan Coe (Knopf)
("Cover to Cover," May 2008)

"Acclaimed for his satires of life in Birmingham, England, Coe explores in this poignant novel, set in the same region, the maddening and tragic generational repercussions that result when those who have children aren’t the ones who want them."

.....

Diary of a Bad Year, by J.M. Coetzee (Viking)
("Cover to Cover," March 2008)

"Even when Coetzee attempts ventriloquism—as he writes in the voices of two young Australians—he fails to break through the fog of his self-absorption…Readers in search of a wallow in schadenfreude should go for Diary of a Bad Year."

.....

Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories, by Nadine Gordimer (FSG)
("Cover to Cover," March 2008)

"Gordimer, in her 84th year, displays her characteristic gusto as she experiments with literary form and function in 'Alternative Endings,' showing how she could end a story in three different ways based on the three senses of sight, hearing, and smell. This is Gordimer’s latest bag of sparkling short stories."

.....

Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance, by Lloyd Jones (Dial)
( to Cover," December 2008)

"As the plot jumps back and forth through many decades between two contrasting nations, Jones proves himself as skilled at evoking exotic Buenos Aires as he is at exploring his native New Zealand."

.....

Master Pip, by Lloyd Jones (Dial)
("Cover to Cover," January/February 2008)

"This charming short novel, which won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, was favored to win the Man Booker Prize, but lost out to Anne Enright’s The Gathering. A pity, since it’s much more original, making some important points about the universality of archetypes and even of eccentricities."

.....

Day, by A.L. Kennedy (Knopf)
("Cover to Cover," April 2008)

"Kennedy skillfully evokes the atmosphere of a defeated Germany and that of a victorious Britain awash in disappointment and disillusion, but she is at her best when conveying the turmoil inside her protagonist’s mind."

.....

Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf)
("Cover to Cover," April 2008)

"So thoroughly and judiciously does she use detail that she easily presents entire lives with each short story. These are tales of careful observation and adjustment."

.....

The House on Fortune Street, by Margot Livesey (HarperCollins)
("Cover to Cover," September 2008)

"Enriched with literary allusion and with locales that span the whole of Great Britain, Livesey’s compelling stories, reaching back into her characters’ childhoods, together with her understated tone and steady, almost reportorial style, show how commonplace, how nearly inevitable, duplicity is."

.....

The Twilight Saga, by Stephanie Meyer (Little, Brown)
Reviewed by Caitlin Flanigan ("What a Girl Wants," December 2008)

"Twilight is fantastic. It’s a page-turner that pops out a lurching, frightening ending I never saw coming. It’s also the first book that seemed at long last to rekindle something of the girl-reader in me. In fact, there are times when the novel stirred something in me so long forgotten that I felt embarrassed by it."

.....

The Complete Novels, by Flann O’Brien (Everyman’s Library)
Reviewed by Joseph O'Neill ("The Last Laugh," May 2008)

"It so happened that two of his five novels were of an originality and durability beyond the scope of almost every other writer, no matter how committed or self-confident."

.....

Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O’Nan (Viking)
("Cover to Cover," January/February 2008)

"The conscientious manager of the soon-to-be-defunct Red Lobster in a tired New England mall seems an unlikely hero, but O’Nan’s customary empathy and scrupulous attention to psychological and external detail coax poetry from the prosaic."

.....

Porius, by John Cowper Powys (Overlook Duckworth)
("Cover to Cover," January/February 2008)

"Tolkienesque in its setting of wooded hills and mysterious mountains and its incorporation of sorcery and martial alliances, Porius is far more historically based than Tolkien’s fantasies (if still often inaccurate) and far more realistically human, and is therefore far messier."

.....

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, by Gregor von Rezzori (New York Review Books)
Reviewed by Christopher Hitchens ("The 2,000-Year-Old Panic," March 2008)

"Those who expect to be reading of lurid pogroms will be disappointed. Writing as he did from the wreckage of postwar Europe, Gregor von Rezzori could claim the peculiar distinction of being one of the few survivors to treat this ultimate catastrophe in the mild language of understatement. This is what still gives his novel the power to shock."

.....

Cost, by Roxana Robinson (FSG)
("Cover to Cover," September 2008)

"Set mostly in a Maine summerhouse more charming than functional, this is a strikingly realistic, psychologically astute study of family relations in modern America’s educated class. Robinson gracefully launches and bolsters her psychological insights with the concrete details of her settings. As always, she writes with impressive polish at both the sentence and structural levels."

.....

Indignation, by Phillip Roth (Houghton Mifflin)
Reviewed by Christopher Hitchens ("Nasty, Brutish and Short," October 2008)

"It was perhaps incautious of Roth to booby-trap this very slight novel with clues to more serious and moving work by others. The characters in Indignation are for the most part thin and flimsy, and the contrived relationship between the local and the cosmic, or the local and the global, finally manages only to produce a mainly storm-in-a-teacup effect."

.....

The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie (Random House)
Reviewed by Christopher Hitchens ("Cassocks and Codpieces," July/August 2008)

"After all the lurid brothel scenes and interludes of lust and obscenity, where it appears for long stretches as if the world is ruled by crude sexual urgency and its power-related sublimations, we find a shining illustration of the precept of Amor Vincit Omnia. In the result, the worlds of illusion and enchantment seem to collapse in upon themselves, leaving a rich compost of legend and myth for successor generations."

.....

Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)
("Cover to Cover," July/August 2008)

"In this superb 'novel in stories,' at once poignant and hopeful, Strout has hit upon a form that highlights her considerable skill at revealing a character by coming at her from every angle."

.....

Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories, by Tobias Wolff (Knopf)
("Cover to Cover," April 2008)

"These tightly focused stories, about a third of them previously unpublished, drive unrelentingly toward their bleak conclusions…Disturbingly, the selfishness Wolff portrays is believable, even at its most extreme."

.....

Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates (Vintage)
Reviewed by Christopher Hitchens ("Revolutionary Road," December 2008)

"The achievement of Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road was to anatomize the ills and woes of suburbia while simultaneously satirizing those suburbanites and others who thought that they themselves were too good for the 'burbs. It is also the reason why the novel can seem, and in the literal sense is, dated."