RaveLiterary Review (UK)It is a very serious and beautiful book about why ‘freedom’ has become such a vexed term, deployed so often in scenarios where it really means the opposite ... ‘thorny and acute’ is a good description of the book, and this is Nelson’s fundamental point. She wants to free herself—and the reader—from ‘today’s tinny stereotypes of bully and snowflake, target and troll, defender and supporter, perpetrator and victim’ ... I don’t agree with everything Nelson says in this book ... Then again, Nelson doesn’t agree with everything she says either: she equivocates dynamically around each argument, illuminating grey areas and uncertainties ... Nelson is such a friend to her reader, such brilliant company. Her book is a nuanced, exhilarating rallying cry for all those who are tired of the drab norms of our tech-topia and who long for another conversation.
Sally Phillips
PositiveThe GuardianIn her fourth book, the US author Helen Phillips creates a sarcastic fable that we realise, in the end, is not very fantastical at all ... Phillips writes particularly well about tedium ... The circumstances of Josephine’s working life are horrible and they canker everything else ... Phillips does not seek to dispel this alienation, or to propose an alternative; she casts her characters into the general mire and invites us to observe their suffering. At times, I longed for Josephine and Trishiffany to understand each other, just for a fleeting moment, or for something funny to happen to alleviate the monochromatic agony. In real life, we are perhaps not uniformly beleaguered: there are moments of tenuous, desperate beauty in the midst of everything. Yet there is a grim power to this novel, and to Phillips’s remorseless scrutiny of her poor characters. The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a fascinating and gruelling portrait of extreme capitalism and the degradation of ordinary lives.
Lina Wolff, Trans. by Saskia Vogel
PositiveThe GuardianWolff is exuberantly tasteless and cynical ... This is all totally improbable, but the impossibility of the story seems quite deliberate ... Wolff’s writing is pared down and laconic; Saskia Vogel’s translation is excellent and perfectly conveys the haut-cynicism of the original ... The result of all this cleverness and torment is a highly enjoyable absurdist comedy about love and desperation, and male geniuses who are feted, and female geniuses who are ignored—and how despite this invidious state of affairs, we might at least agree that book reviewers are the worst people of all. That is, apart from novelists.
Ali Smith
RaveThe Guardian\"In her memory-scapes and dreamworlds, Smith reveals the buried longings of her characters; their agony, their hopeful eagerness, their fear of death. At one point, she imagines \'all the things from the past…like a huge national orchestra biding its time…all the objects holding still and silent till the shops empty of people…Then, when darkness falls, the symphony…The symphony of the sold and the discarded. The symphony of all the lives that had these things in them once. The symphony of worth and worthlessness.\' Autumn is a beautiful, poignant symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities; the \'endless sad fragility\' of mortal lives.\
