It's refreshing to see a book of literary criticism devoted to writers, past and present, from countries and cultures as divergent as Hungary, Switzerland and Peru. Unfortunately, in these reviews, taken primarily from the New Republic
, Boyers comes not to praise international literature but to bury it. His appraisals are resolutely negative; even commendation is parceled out negatively—in reviewing the late Natalia Ginzburg, he opens with a lengthy look at her apparent pleasure in criticizing the works of friends. Boyers also has a tendency to begin an essay with a more general idea and then focus on the writer at hand. This technique works well only once, in a thought-provoking treatment of evil in the works of Kafka, Naipaul and Coetzee. More often, the yoking of subjects is forced and artificial, as when he uses the work of Nadine Gordimer to launch an attack on postmodern criticism, which relegates the work of the great South African to the position of a mere prop. This is a shame, since Americans know so little of international writing. But in the pursuit of academic considerations, Boyers does little to make a reader want to pick up any of the writers he spends so much time critiquing. (Nov.)
