Review by New York Times Review
ONGOINGNESS: The End of a Diary, by Sarah Manguso. (Graywolf, $14.) Out of a desire to record every detail of her life, Manguso, a poet, began keeping a journal over 25 years ago - and was so prolific that her entries reached about 800,000 words. In this slim volume, she reflects on the project and her efforts to guard against forgetting, death and "that great and ongoing blank." THE ARRANGEMENT, by Sarah Dunn. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) Owen and Lucy have fled New York City for the Hudson Valley, settling in a 200-year-old house and stocking the coop with chickens. But paradise has its downsides, and the couple rock their upstate idyll by trying out an open marriage. What begins as an affair with a man in the city develops into love, and Lucy confronts an old question: whether passion or stability will win out. RUMI'S SECRET: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love, by Brad Gooch. (Harper Perennial, $17.99.) Few figures have had the same resonance and enduring popularity as Jalai al-Din Mohammad Rumi, the 13th-century Muslim mystic who has been a muse for everyone from Madonna to budding Pinterest spiritualists. Gooch investigates Rumi's life and theology, with a focus on his life-changing, and creatively rich, relationship with the mystic Shams. SNOWBLIND, by Ragnar Jonasson. Translated by Quentin Bates. (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne, $9.99.) It's 2008 and Ari Thor Árason, a recent police academy graduate in a remote Icelandic village, is investigating the death of a local author. "This classically crafted whodunit holds up nicely," our reviewer, Marilyn Stasio, wrote. "But Jonasson's true gift is for describing the daunting beauty of the fierce setting, lashed by blinding snowstorms that smother the village in 'a thick, white darkness' that is strangely comforting." I CONTAIN MULTITUDES: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, by Ed Yong. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) Yong, a British science journalist, investigates the vivid, all-encompassing realm of our microbiome - the essential microscopic organisms that help bolster our health and work in concert with our bodies to shape how they work. (By a recent estimate, only half the human body is made up of human cells.) A HORSE WALKS INTO A BAR, by David Grossman. Translated by Jessica Cohen. (Vintage, $15.95.) In the basement of an Israeli comedy club, Dovaleh G's routine quickly veers into tales of his tormented childhood. Grossman's novel won the Man Booker International Prize in 2017. Our reviewer, Gary Shteyngart, called it a "magnificently comic and sucker-punchtragic excursion into brilliance."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 11, 2018]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The subtitle of Manguso's elegant, slim meditation is both deceptive and true. Though she despises endings-time, she reiterates, is not a journey from one fixed point to another but rather a never-ending continuum-she wants to explore what it means to end something that for so long made up a crucial part of her identity: for 25 years, Manguso kept a diary, a document that's now more than 800,000 words. Rather than just recording momentous events, she admits that "I couldn't face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened." Curiously, this new volume, which is not the diary-an afterword discusses her decision process whether or not to excerpt it-but a reflection on the process itself and what it meant to her to be so focused on documenting and giving meaning to moments that might, in fact, have no meaning. It would be too simplistic-and nothing about Manguso's prose, despite its sparseness, is simple-to conflate her role as a mother with her changing views on the nature of time and the meaning, or lack thereof, of moments. Structured somewhat like a prose poem-there's more white space on each page than there is text-Manguso's essay is both grounding and heady, the spark of a larger, important conversation that makes readers all the more eager for her future output. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A chronic diarist discovers that there's a lot to be said for putting your pen down.There seems be a pattern with Manguso. The more weighty and personal her books get, dealing with everything from her own dread illness (Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir, 2008) to a friend's suicide (The Guardians: An Elegy, 2012), the shorter they are. Her latest is remarkably brief, with more white space than print, devoted to the seemingly dull topic of why she quit her diary. But the brevity is the point: Where Manguso's 25-year journal was obsessively detailed, this eulogy doesn't have a wasted word. She's a Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis, both in the way she distills complex thoughts on time and memory into pure essence and in how she examines writing as a means of control. "I didn't want to lose anything," Manguso states at the beginning. "That was my main problem. I couldn't face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened." The diary eventually became a crutch for survival: "If I allowed myself to drift through undocumented time for more than a day, I'd be swept up, no longer able to remember the purpose of continuing." Keeping a diary meant imposing a shape or structure on life, a view that changed when motherhood ruptured her own space-time continuum: "I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby's continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against." While Manguso's thoughts are inward, they work outwardfrom her life to life itself. Read as either a meditative essay or a revealing confessional poem, this is a thoughtful, reflective look at one talented writer's creative evolution. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
