
Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 8 reviews on

Critically acclaimed, prize-winning author Andrés Neuman's Fracture is an ambitious literary novel set against Japan's 2011 nuclear accident in a cross-cultural story about how every society remembers and forgets its catastrophes.
Mr. Yoshie Watanabe, a former electronics company executive and a survivor of the atomic bomb, has always lived like a fugitive from his own memories. He's spent decades traveling the world, making a life in different languages, only to find himself home again, living in Tokyo in his old age. On the afternoon of March 11, 2011, Watanabe, like millions of others, is stunned by powerful tremors. A massive earthquake has struck to the north, triggering the Fukushima nuclear disaster--and a stirring of the collective past. As the catastrophe unfolds, Watanabe's mind, too, undergoes a tectonic shift. With his native land yet again under nuclear threat, he braces himself to make the most surprising decision of his nomadic life. Meanwhile, four women who have known him intimately at various points in time narrate their stories to a strangely obsessive Argentinian journalist. Their memories, colored by their respective cultures and describing different ways of loving, trace sociopolitical maps of Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, and Madrid over the course of the twentieth century. The result is a metalingual, border-defying constellation of fractures in life and nature--proof that nothing happens in only one place, that every human event reverberates to the ends of the earth. With unwavering empathy and bittersweet humor, and facing some of the most urgent environmental concerns of our time, Andrés Neuman's Fracture is a powerful novel about the resilience of humankind, and the beauty that can emerge from broken things."Neuman is a literary alchemist . . . [Fracture is] a moving meditation on the reverberating waves that shape us and the inescapable impermanence of life." --Kirkus Reviews
"Filled with insights into cross-cultural intimacies, [Fracture] is charged with . . . distaste for what history does to tragedies: turning injuries of flesh and blood into crude symbols." --The New Yorker "Fracture is by far the Argentinian writer Andrés Neuman's most successful experiment . . . that which should be said must be said - and Neuman undoubtedly says it beautifully." --Ian Sansom, The Guardian "Fracture asks how we can live, as individuals and as communities, in the long shadow of catastrophe . . . More than once, Mr. Neuman's evocations of the aftermaths of 1945 and 2011 bring the vacant, haunted spaces of 2020 to mind. In our deserted cities, we too have had "to contemplate what life looks like when there should be no one left." --Boyd Tonkin, The Wall Street Journal