... sly, intriguing ... Perhaps novelist chauvinism made me read the assignments more as creative writing prompts than credible therapeutic exercises, but then again hasn’t that distinction always been somewhat moot? A glib observation, but also a truism playfully inhabited within these pages as the psychologist laments and celebrates 'this hall of mirrors that we call life' ... Ostensibly recounted with nothing but clinical curiosity, the transgressive patient’s evasions, provocations and sleights of hand are in this way craftily enacted by the novel itself.
Lindstedt’s novel reads like the love child of a pornographer and a high theorist: Derrida meets Anaïs Nin. Ultimately, this is as much a novel about language as it is about sexuality or psychology, and translator Hackston has performed a virtuosic task capturing the Finnish pyrotechnics in English. Lindstedt may not be looking to make an exact analogy between the work of therapy and the work an artist does, but it’s hard not to read this as an ars poetica ... Bawdy and beguiling.
... uneven ... Though often humorous, some of the arch prose falls flat ... Still, fans of subversive stories of psychoanalysis may want to take a look.
