Haunted by the past …

… the ties that bind - bookforum.com / current issue. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What makes A Legacy intriguing is not the social milieu, however, or even the characters themselves. Rather, it is the style of the book, its rhythmic energy. The reader can never guess how a sentence will end, or what is coming in the next phrase. Nothing obvious ever happens. Each image has been freshly chiseled, or rendered with a sparkling and glittering wit. Sarah, for example, “liked few people, had never loved and liked at the same time for long; she could not afford not to like herself. Dignity and conscience were her shell and her recourse. She had presence, she was instructed, she judged, she was too tall; men treated her as she appeared to them, and never, once, had she been spoken to in the way Julius spoke to Tzara, his chimpanzee.”