“A quietly accomplished and unusually constructed novel that marks the debut of a significant talent.” the bachelor
WE WANT WHAT WE WANT Stories
at once a paean to familial love and friendship and a reckoning with racism and police violence. By turns playful and surprising and intimate, a moving meditation on being Black in America.
TO WALK ALONE IN THE CROWD
Muñoz Molina, Antonio Trans. by Bleichmar, Guillermo Farrar, Straus and Giroux (432 pp.) $28.00 | Jul. 13, 2021 978-0-374-19025-5
Stories about people waiting for their lives to change. The characters in Ohlin’s latest collection seem detached, as if they’re watching their own lives—they’re weary but not unamused. In “Money, Geography, Youth,” a young woman returns to LA after volunteering in Ghana and discovers that her father has gotten engaged to her best friend. “I know, it’s so weird,” her friend says. In “The Brooks Brothers Guru,” a young man joins what may or may not be a cult. He leaves a somewhat cryptic message on his Facebook and then signs off. His cousin goes to look for him, but when she finds him living in a seemingly idyllic old house, discussing literature and philosophy with the other members, she considers staying herself. In “The Point of No Return,” one of the finest stories in this very fine collection, a woman’s life seems to pass her by. “Sometimes she saw her life as a tender thing that was separate from herself,” Ohlin writes, “a tiny animal she had happened upon by chance one day and decided to raise.” Ohlin’s stories have a quiet elegance to them and a restraint, although they’re filled, too, with grief and with loss: In many of the stories, a mother or a daughter has gone away, leaving her family behind without explanation. Some of the stories are told in the first person and some in the third, but, either way, there is a kind of sameness that stretches across the book as a whole. The sameness has less to do with what happens (or doesn’t happen) and more to do with how the characters sound—they all seem to have the same voice. Still, Ohlin handles them with such nuance that, in the end, the book is a pleasure to behold. A wry and moving collection that supplies no easy, unearned endings.
y o u n g a d u lt
Muñoz Molina walks through the cacophony of 21st-century life with the ghosts of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas De Quincey, and other famous men. In this book, the winner of France’s 2020 Medici Prize for Foreign Novel, Muñoz Molina writes with a poet’s sensibility as he collages subway advertisements, commercials, overheard conversations, and news headlines with writing that feels like it’s part fiction, part memoir. The narrator, “a spy on a secret mission to record and collect it all,” wanders New York and Madrid recording the noise of city life. Muñoz Molina writes, “I switch on the voice recorder to repeat something I’ve read. I press stop but a moment later I have to switch it on again. Give blood. We buy gold. The signs along the sidewalk gradually fall into a cadence. We buy silver and gold. Give life.” Reading paragraphs composed almost entirely of these recorded words across this 400-plus-page book becomes suffocating, though the paragraphs made from news headlines replicate the 24-hour news cycle’s deluge with stunning accuracy. Relief arrives when the collage becomes an epiphany about life, capitalism, wandering, or the self; or when Muñoz Molina indulges in fascinating stories about the lives of Baudelaire, Poe, De Quincey, and more. The second section, “Mr. Nobody,” tells the story of a man wandering New York City who “has no name, at present, no face, and no biography” and feels as though “he is one more among the city’s invisible denizens.” “Mr. Nobody” is interwoven with stories about the same famous men but feels less claustrophobic because here Muñoz Molina focuses more on describing the city and its people, which enriches the experience of wandering. While this book is a flâneur’s catalog of walking among the noise of the modern world, it often feels like a marathon.
Ohlin, Alix Knopf (256 pp.) $25.95 | Jul. 27, 2021 978-0-525-65463-6
THE BACHELOR
Palmer, Andrew Hogarth/Crown (288 pp.) $23.49 | Jul. 20, 2021 978-0-593-23089-3 Palmer’s ruminative first novel mixes cultural analysis with the affecting story of a young man’s slow reengagement with his life. The unnamed 29-year-old narrator has returned to his hometown, Des Moines, after the breakup of a long-term relationship. His first novel has been published, and he has abandoned the draft of his second. While staying at his mother’s friend’s house, he becomes enthralled with the reality TV show The Bachelor and with the life and work of the poet John Berryman. As he reflects on art, |
kirkus.com
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fiction
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15 may 2021
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