Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Hermione Hoby on Harriet Clark’s The Hill, Avi Shlaim on Omer Bartov’s Israel: What Went Wrong, Parul Sehgal on Gisèle Pelicot’s A Hymn to Life, Nicolás Medina Mora on Álvaro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender, Sophie Gilbert on Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear.
“The premise sounds like a bad dream: Towering above your life stands a hill that you must keep ascending and descending forever. Or, to put the conceit of Harriet Clark’s breathtaking debut novel in more concrete terms: 8-year-old Suzanna pledges to visit, each week, the hilltop prison where her mother is serving a life sentence until that sentence is complete — to become a sort of secondary prisoner of her mother’s fate. The Hill might be dreamlike, but it’s far from nightmarish, instead charged with a hushed quality of distillation, lustrous with the obscure meaning of familial romance, plus the sense—common to dreams— of promising some final understanding that can be carried into waking life.”
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“Childhood, much like dreams, is difficult to write about without succumbing to vagueness and sentimentality; there’s also the unfortunate way it means so much more to the person who experienced it than to anyone else. There are none of those pitfalls here. Clark renders Suzanna’s state of unknowing exquisitely.
