California Literary Review

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

• Book Review: The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon
  Posted on 02 May 2013 in Biography, Books, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  The title The Book of My Lives is apt: rather than presenting a seamless memoir, Hemon instead emphasizes discontinuity, a series of Aleksandar Hemons moving before us in different settings, sometimes without roots to ground them. His decision to provide his version of a table of contents at the end of the book, and to title it “Table of Discontents,” is a play on words that reveals a sense of sadness and dislocation.

• Book Review: Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa
  Posted on 11 Feb 2013 in Books, Fiction Reviews, Horror, Japan, Short Stories
  

  Ogawa begins by showing her readers the apparently boring, normal face of human society, and then slowly lets this face of normality slide back to reveal decomposition, death, and emptiness.

• Book Review: Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra
  Posted on 22 Jan 2013 in Books, Fiction Reviews
  

  Like Bolaño, Zambra was born in Santiago, Chile. However, he was born later, in 1975, part of a generation that spent its childhood under Pinochet’s rule. In Ways of Going Home, Zambra depicts childhood experiences of trying to understand the cryptic comments and peculiar actions of adults, in an atmosphere where children’s simple pleasures – such as going to watch a soccer match at a municipal stadium — bring back memories of terror, incarcerations, and disappeared loved ones for their parents and neighbors.