Bookforum: The Best News . . .

The September/October/November issue of Bookforum went online yesterday, and is absolutely loaded with reviews of great books.

Of course, in a somewhat self-serving way, I’m especially excited about this issue since it has a very positive review of the first Open Letter title: Nobody’s Home by Dubravka Ugresic.

Being at home in the world, as exile and citizen, likewise defined Russian émigré Nina Berberova: “I always sympathize with one who flees his nest, even if he flees into an anthill, where it may be crowded but one can find solitude . . . that precious and intense state of being conscious of the world and of oneself.” Ugresic might agree, as she allows The Ministry of Pain to end with a reprieve for Tanja. But what happens when borders and the identities they engender cease to have meaning or, in the case of Ugresic’s Yugoslavia, cease to exist? Ugresic cites the case of Ivo Andrić. Once considered a “Yugoslav writer,” Andrić was reclassified by a Croatian lexicon in the interest of tidying up the category of domestic literature: He was defined “by blood (as a Croatian writer), by residence (as a Serbian writer), and by themes (as a Bosnian writer).” The notion that a literary text must bear the burden of identification tags is, for Ugresic, an affront; it entails tacit approval of the idea that “the field of literature is nothing more than a realm of geopolitics.”

In addition to this review though, there’s a long list of pieces I want to read:

Rick Moody on The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin;

Rivka Galchen on The Only Son by Stéphane Audeguy;

John Freeman on To Siberia by Per Petterson;

Britt Peterson on “Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya;”:

Sarah Fay on A Manuscript of Ashes by Antonio Muñoz Molina;

Tayt Harlin on Voice Over by Céline Curiol;

and, Craig Seligman on What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire? by António Lobo Antunes.

And that’s just on the fiction side . . .