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The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Julianna Romanazzi on the punctuation-confused “There Are Things I Want You to Know” About Stieg and Me by Eva Gabrielsson, translated by Linda Coverdale and published by Seven Stories.
Julianna’s been posting here for the past few months during her summer internship. She’s currently studying at Hobart & William Smith, and likes to tango.
This book isn’t exactly the sort of book we usually review here, but the whole Stieg Larsson phenomenon sure is something. And Eva Gabrielsson’s situation is pretty interesting. (See this Publishing Perspectives piece for more info about the boo.)
The book itself is meant to be a “biography“—take that as you will—of the late author’s long time partner Eva Gabrielsson, whom he met at age nineteen (she was eighteen), and stayed with for over 30 years. Eva chronicles the ups and downs of their life together, the different political movements and counter movements the couple was involved in, the roots and creation of the Millennium Trilogy, and their reasons for avoiding marriage. The last part of the book is also devoted to Eva’s loss of control over Stieg’s legacy and the downward spiral of his estate.
Gabrielsson writes “This book . . . I wish I hadn’t had to write it. It talks about Stieg, and our life together, but also about my life without him.” Reviews call the book “poignant,” “romantic,” and “touching”; and it is. There are moments of great accomplishment and personal danger mixed with the little everyday couples’ rituals that keep a relationship alive. But there is, of course, another tension.
The book admits early on, in both a foreword by Marie-Francoise Colombani and in the first chapter, that Eva is “today fighting to obtain control over Larsson’s literary estate.” An estate that is according to some sources worth $15 million dollars or more (over 97 million Swedish kronos), the sixth largest estate attributed to a dead celebrity after Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, JRR Tolkien, Charles Schulz, and John Lennon. But that is not to say that the book does not have its moments of emotion and poignancy.
Click here to read the entire review.
Reviewed by Brendan Riley
This slender, uncanny volume—the second, best-selling collection of stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to appear in the U.S.—has already received considerable, well-deserved praise from many critics and high profile publications. Its seventeen short tales, averaging ten pages each, are. . .
Reviewed by Rachael Daum
The Urdu word basti refers to any space, intimate to worldly, and is often translated as “common place” or “a gathering place.” This book by Intizar Husain, who is widely regarded as one of the most important living Pakistani writers,. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
The Whispering Muse, one of three books by Icelandic writer Sjón just published in North America, is nothing if not inventive. Stories within stories, shifting narration, leaps in time, and characters who transform from men to birds and back again—you’ve. . .
Reviewed by Camila Santos
Luis Negrón’s debut collection Mundo Cruel is a journey through Puerto Rico’s gay world. Published in 2010, the book is already in its fifth Spanish edition. Here in the U.S., the collection has been published by Seven Stories Press and. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
“South”
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of. . .
Reviewed by Larissa Kyzer
When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can. . .
Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols
When starting Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories, Santiago Roncagliolo’s second work to be translated into English, I was expecting Roncagliolo to explore the line between evil and religion that was front and center in Red April. Admittedly, I. . .
Reviewed by Josh Billings
Christa Wolf’s newly-translated City of Angels is a novel of atonement, and in this way the work of art that it resembles most to me is not another book, but the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation. Like that. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
French author—philosopher, poet, novelist—de Roblès writes something approaching the Great (Latin) American Novel, about Brazilian characters, one of whom is steeped in the life of the seventeenth century polymath (but almost always erroneous) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Eleazard von Wogau, a. . .
Reviewed by Brendan Riley
A rich, beautifully written, consistently surprising satire, Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses boasts an elaborate, engrossing plot with disarming twists and compelling characters both challenged and challenging. It leads the reader on a strange pilgrimage—often melancholy but certainly rewarding—through a China. . .
Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
