PositiveThe Guardian\"Ecstasy is a word I’d happily associate with Patrick Langley’s lyrical and looping novel The Variations, a work with a similarly thrilling Nabokovian intrigue in the relationship between patterning, form and meaning ... And this is also a book about how to live, particularly how to live with a past that so conspicuously collides and fugues with the present. How to break free from sameness, to turn repetition into variation? The novel’s epigraph – \'Variation is among the oldest and most basic devices in music. It originates in an inherent tendency to modify identical recurrence\' – is a quote from the American composer Leon Stein, and almost laughably banal when held up against Langley’s humming prose. But its message is clear: it is Nabokov’s magic carpet, that age-old human impulse that – like music – wants to modify, edit, exceed, transcend itself. With The Variations, Langley appears to be weaving a carpet of his own.\
Yoko Tawada, tr. Margaret Mitsutani
RaveThe Financial Times (UK)As if pulling the world’s fibres apart and reconstructing them anew, Tawada’s Earth is recognisably our own and notably out of shape ... unfolds over 10 elegantly written chapters, narrated by a cast of dispersed — but strangely interlinked — characters ... Comical linguistic glitches sparkle throughout the novel ... Reading Tawada you feel her subtle authorial presence, simultaneously guiding the reader ashore and casting us out to sea; paradoxically, both lead to a single destination. Where do we — along with Hiruko, Knut, Akash, Tenzo, Nora and Susanoo — end up? It can only be described as somewhere soft and strange and new.
Sasa Stanišić, Tr. Damion Searls
PositiveFinancial Times (UK)Stanisic’s fragmented style effectively mirrors the book’s subject matter. Knowledge is gained piecemeal, drip-fed through Stanisic’s kaleidoscopic prose. He recounts anecdotes, memories and biographical details in simple, matter-of-fact sentences. Sometimes he resorts to lists, WhatsApp conversations, passing observations in the way that memory, too, unfolds in disconnected images and incomplete narratives. Stanisic is a versatile writer and moments of acerbic wit—which recall the razor-sharp commentary of fellow Yugoslav-born author Dubravka Ugresic—are interspersed with poignant descriptions of unbelonging in Germany ... A final act of multiple endings affirms that our lives can never be neatly packaged: reality’s edges are too frayed. A more structurally straightforward finale might have offered something more; the book already does enough to imply that futures are slippery and contingent, more influenced by immigration officers than personal agency. Where Stanisic succeeds is in inviting us to honour and acknowledge what Roland Barthes called the \'what has been\', the uncanny evidence of our past; there, we might be able to save our stories from being swept away by the current.
Pajtim Statovci, tr. David Hackston
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Few authors today write about fear as vividly as Kosovan-born Pajtim Statovci ... Forced by society behind closed doors, their love finds space to breathe in Statovci’s sensitive prose. He writes beautifully about the ecstasy of early passion through surreal, painterly detail ... When Arsim finally decides to seek out Miloš after the war, we suspect there won’t be a storybook ending; Bolla shifts from being a dream-filled anticipation of the future to a taut negotiation of the past. Only in escaping the deadening circuitry of fantasy, suggests Statovci, can we begin to bear reality.
Kapka Kassabova
PositiveThe New Statesman (UK)Neatly adhering to rules of three, Kassabova’s well-researched and personal book contains three strands: vivid travelogue, ancestral memoir and historical analysis. Tracing the contours of the lakes by boat, foot and car, each of the lyrical chapters contains lucid stories of the shores’ inhabitants, whose tales of persecution and resistance resemble those of her own family ... peopled by memorable characters, brought alive in ethnographic detail ... She presents the region as containing multitudes of human experience, stories of great suffering and defiance, cruelty and comedy. If disbelief remains, it’s a result of too much reality, not fantasy ... For a region enmeshed in recent conflict, the symbolic forgiveness of the lake is poignant. Kassabova tells us that agon (violent contest) inevitably leads to agonia (agony). But all is swallowed by the lake, and its merciful embrace.
Jaed Coffin
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksAt first glance, this lewd combination of testosterone and sleaze sounds like any other banal boxing story, but this is merely a glittery distraction to the memoir’s deeper preoccupation — Coffin’s compelling confrontation with his father, his mixed identity, and his ingrained sense of masculinity. At its heart, Roughhouse Friday details Coffin’s hunger for a language he can call his own ... The book’s most powerful moments occur at the arrival of...realizations: Coffin reveals how he began to see how his father created the terms of his mother’s existence...While Coffin unravels these knots with an impressive emotional dexterity, some are perhaps too tightly woven to see ... Though he has gone some way to shed the skin his father has wrapped around him, its flakey residue remains ... Roughhouse Fridayis therefore the search for a new language that never quite manifests. But it was by no means in vain. Coffin’s triumph lies in ridding the language of his father, a language that compelled him to dwell in a house he did not recognize as his own.
