RaveThe Guardian (UK)The true object of Butler’s sophisticated, ambivalent satire may be millennial fiction’s tendency to celebrate the liberatory potential of sincere self-narration and downplay economic advantage.
Olga Ravn, trans. by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Not unusual in folding a knowledgable, articulate discussion of this work into a real-time analysis of its own intimate story. But that story, told across a range of forms, is at once irrepressibly lively and painfully elusive. The strength of this book is the way that it dramatises a gap between explanation and lived experience ... Ravn and her translators, Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, move effortlessly between prose, poetry, diary, script, information leaflet, letter and literary criticism.
Nell Stevens
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Stevens is brilliant at describing desire ... Employing an impossible narrator is one way to sidestep the pedantry that historical fiction can fall into. Nevertheless it’s jarring when Blanca describes herself as \'neurotic\', and it’s unclear why she is not surrounded by other ghosts. Stevens is not a writer who worries about mechanics and fidelity to the historical account. Instead, she follows the story and what matters to the characters in it ... Much more than Stevens’s previous books, her novel makes space for the uncelebrated labour on which creativity depends ... Amélie the maid’s daily trials with this depressed animal are a subplot more striking than the composer’s familiar turmoil and bloody phlegm. With skill and insight, the novel follows Sand’s struggle to keep hold of her children, her romantic attachments, and her work, and shows that Chopin never faced the same difficult choices. It is telling that the gloves that protect the composer’s delicate fingers are made of kid.
Maddie Mortimer
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)... ambitious, sprawling ... Mortimer’s writing is restlessly inventive. It includes different fonts, stanzas, visual arrangements, lists and playful definitions, without settling on a particular approach. Images are often both pleasing and convoluted ... The novel is most involving where the body is intensely present – as in the often ambivalent sex between Lia and Matthew – or painfully absent, as in an excruciating scene on a train where a man attempts to grope Lia’s breasts, only to find that they have been removed. Embodied experience is important to the plot, which turns on revelations about blood ties. The exploration of different kinship relationships is delicate and persuasive ... But the focus is easily distracted ... The capriciousness of this voice is sharply funny, frustrating and genuinely odd. Sometimes it seems to attack the body and sometimes to be the body; sometimes it channels fear and sometimes it is the cause of fear. Occasionally, I heard its heckling as an expression of the writer’s own understandable unease. The publisher’s press release includes a letter from Mortimer herself, outlining the book’s origins in personal experience and expressing a hope that readers will be\'gentle\'. This is unnecessary. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies sets its own terms, however strange and conflicted those terms may be.
