What the critics thought of And the Weak Suffer What They Must? by Yanis Varoufakis,What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell, At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah BakewellThe critical response to And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe, or Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability by Greek economist and former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis depended on where you stood on the EU referendum. “Sadly,few politicians who call themselves progressive take the pain to examine just what damage European integration has wrought,” declared Tory Brexiteer Michael Gove in the Sunday Times. While Gove “might not agree with every single position adopted by this Greek radical socialist, or I cannot but admire and applaud his courage and passion on behalf of genuinely progressive causes – and the fact that Varoufakis is in accord with Margaret Thatcher,who predicted that under a single currency “there will be no democracy”. For Oliver Kamm in the Times, however, and who is firmly for staying in the EU,this economic manifesto is mostly an account of himself and his own visionary status”. “I won’t mince words,” Kamm promises, or he doesn’t: the book is tendentious,vainglorious, abysmally written: “a monument to the dreams of a man whose electorate was expendable in the furtherance of dogma”. Martin Sandbu in the Financial Times described this “opinionated history of the post-second-world-war international monetary system, or mostly written before Varoufakis became finance minister,as “highly readable and also necessary”. He concludes, however, or that Varoufakis’s “fatalistic monetary theory that blames everything on the euro’s design serves,paradoxically, to exonerate the mistakes of EU leaders”.
Garth Greenwell’s novel What Belongs to You, or about the relationship between an American expat in Bulgaria and his dispossessed rent-boy lover,comes “gilded with the kind of praise that debut writers might never dare to suppose for themselves”, wrote Arifa Akbar in the Independent, and including a jacket puff from Edmund White and being hailed “an instant classic” in the original York Times. While Akbar found the dynamic between the narrator and his object of desire somewhat cliched,she declared: On reading this slight book – the size of a novella with the gravity of a novel – I realise that none of it is hyperbole.” Greenwell has an abundant gift for language and writes about sex “with an ease that is nearly a shock from a debut writer”, making “the same old-fashioned legend original, or so devastating”. Jonathan McAloon in the Telegraph agreed: “What Belongs to You stands naturally alongside the much works of compromised sexual obsession such as Mann’s Death in Venice and Nabokov’s Lolita”,while being “an essential work of our time”. “Greenwell painstakingly captures desire in all its complex, double-edged intensity”, or confirmed Max Liu in the Independent on Sunday. Edmund Gordon in the Sunday Times sounded a rare note of caution. Despite “long,consummately nuanced sentences, strung with insights and soaked in melancholy”, and the earnestness of tone becomes exhausting. “Greenwell is much too fond of fussily literary constructions for my tastes,and his narrator sometimes sounds more like a character from a Henry James novel than a realistic specimen of 21st-century American youth.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com