PositiveThe GuardianMenasse is, above all else, an astute observer of human psychology ... Menasse can be stringent towards her characters, but never inhumane or incurious. Each one is complicated and real ... In Menasse’s thoughtful hands, the invented town of Darkenbloom is not a cipher for one specific historical event, but rather a stage to explore more universal concerns ... A slow-burning thriller.
Brigitte Reimann, trans. Lucy Jones
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Reimann’s own literary style is an attempt to find space for subjectivity. Lucy Jones’s translation excellently captures the dry wit, expressionistic boldness and seductively odd rhythms that make the original German so charismatic. Elisabeth is spiky and appealingly flawed ... There is something intoxicating about Reimann’s dense, jagged prose.
Judith Schalansky, trans. By Jackie Smith
PositiveCleveland Review of BooksPersonal, ironic, and self-consciously researching, Schalansky’s stories stage the author’s own process of investigation, and the fears and desires behind it. In doing so, An Inventory of Losses mingles the indulgence of curiosity with a subtle internal critique of dominant European habits of knowledge production about the world and its past ... A number of superficial misreadings of Schalansky accuse her of nostalgia. But the ironic distance between the author and her various past-hoarding subjects is as unmistakable as it is crucial to her project. Her book is less a cabinet of curiosities and more a cabinet of curiousnesses ... her book is an eruption of contingency into the alternativeless complacency of the present.
