RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksMore compelling than it initially sounds ... Characteristic of her boundless, inventive fiction, Oyeyemi’s novel has a prominent book-within-a-book structure that complicates any supposed straightforwardness ... Far from a stagnant, historical object: it is a book that changes depending on when it is read and who is reading it ... A pamphlet-book that is at once deeply tangible, irrefutably there, and yet also highly subjective, more than just a bit tricky.
Tove Ditlevsen, trans. by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books... the three books...have an easy, natural cadence to them, as though they are being typed out in front of you ... Like hundred-year-old glass, Ditlevsen’s writing is elegant, transparent, with glorious whorls of minor distortions and an unaffected beauty, but this seamless surface belies a scaffolding that is forbiddingly sound ... Her books consistently wield their striking present-ness, vibrating with the frequency of first-time experience. Ditlevsen is not big on agonized self-reflection. Nor is she big on reckoning with her traumas. Instead, temporality folds like a Möbius strip, and she crafts a story of her future from material that is always already in her past. Her writing maintains its paradoxical present tense, its unrelenting immediacy, a position in which she too apparently doesn’t know what’s going to happen, even as she prefigures the events to come so that when they do inevitably come, they come with echoes ... Details that seemed superfluous, merely residual symptoms of realism, are exposed as deliberate inclusions; they at once reveal not only the haunting of a life, but also the thoughtful narrativization of it ... For us, the wound is slowly assimilated over the course of the trilogy by an exacting Ditlevsen, compelling us to reckon with her past and trauma in just the order she presents it to us.
