Rave4ColumnsThe writing is undoubtedly colored by dissatisfaction, but it never reads as veiled confession, much less indulgence, being smart enough to draw out the pleasure the malcontent finds skittering over the surface of her gloom ... There’s fun throughout Ghost Pains, but there is also an ambient dread that never quite goes away.
Sheila Heti
RaveThe BafflerEverything in Pure Colour, the new novel by Sheila Heti, vibrates with instability, with the shimmering frisson of one teetering on the edge ... An air of uncertainty ...pervade[s] its pages. Formally fragmented, it is almost gleefully inconsistent in tense, point of view, and even style—the prose is now lush, now cynical, now lyrical, now essayistic. Themes do not so much resonate from section to section as whisper and flit; ideas and sensations connect but often only just ... Creation, time, the nature of God: these perennial mysteries are not simply broached in Pure Colour but seized upon with vigor ... [The] opening staves are biblical in tone, tapping into an old, even ancient irony that distinguishes them from the purely oracular. Still, there is something unnervingly declarative here ... Characters are few and mostly gestured-toward, events rendered evocatively but incompletely, questions raised and, at first glance, left unanswered. Still, there is a strange compulsion to the course of things ... Pure Colour is Heti’s most rigorously interior novel precisely because she has let go of so clearly defined an I and instead explored how it is contact with others that makes oneself recognizable, even possible. And, fittingly for a novel of undercurrents, of silent and swift propulsions, it is through these multiplications that Heti manages to hint at, even, at times, to illuminate, the unified stuff of reality that both undergirds life and suffuses it.
Linda Bostrom Knausgaard, Trans. by Rachel Willson-Broyles
PositiveBookslut... an exercise in fantastic metaphor and allegory, with a strong mythological core and vivid imagery throughout. The strangeness, originality, and supreme gentleness of the narrator\'s inner world contrast sharply with the more recognizable, though not in all respects ordinary world into which she is forced. This, combined with her quiet determination to find her father and the increasingly astonishing events that occur, all add up to form a surprisingly modern portrait of longing and the possibility of homecoming ... The prose, though tightly wound and highly lyrical, is as demanding as it is lucid, to say nothing of the story itself, which progresses less through the events related than layers of the young protagonist\'s psyche and spirit. But there is an unmistakable rhythm to the Knausgård\'s narrative, even something like a musical key, and The Helios Disaster is virtually without a misplayed note. A slight deferment of judgment is necessary, but once granted, the world as described here envelops the reader in a way that only a very strong artist can produce ... but it is very much a first novel. There are too many undeveloped characters, too many unanswered questions. All of these, to be sure, stem not from laziness but from the overwhelming force of the central figure of Anna, but the book nevertheless is stained by being simply too rough around the edges. But what is strong here is extraordinary.
