PositiveThe Minneapolis Star TribuneIt’s hard for me to believe that Daehan would go through so much physical hardship and emotional suffering alone, as a self-styled orphan, rather than contact either parent again ... Krys Lee inhabits her protagonists in a precise, elegant style that is a consolation for all the misery.
Chuck Klosterman
PositiveThe Minneapolis Star TribuneWho knows? Klosterman concludes, ending with the unanswerable questions he started with. He writes with self-deprecating humor in an endearingly informal style that makes his philosophical inquiries easy to read. But what I take away from reading is, so what? Whatever we discover, or never will, we’ll live our daily lives regardless of the big picture, if there is one.
Dorthe Nors, Trans. by Misha Hoekstra
PanThe Minneapolis Star TribuneThinking about the formal patterns of the novellas, I surmise that the monotone of the first is meant to evoke the daily and often tedious experience of suffering, while the second reduces a life to a to-do list, not of chores and obligations per se, but the daily experience of living and acting (or not acting), grinding out the mostly ordinary days. But the stylization does nothing much for the experience. The characters’ tedium shouldn’t translate to ours. Given that these two women lead middle-class, uneventful lives, a little more stylistic pizazz would have relieved my frequent boredom.
