RaveAstraThe thirteen stories in Panics — rendered into beautiful, plainspoken English by translator Emma Ramadan, and by turns surreal, mesmerizing, and darkly unhinged —bear the mark of their writer’s painstaking process ... There is a powerful, elegiac quality to Molinard’s writing borne out by her characters’ deep sense of isolation and dispossession. Suspended between a literal beginning and a presumed end, her characters are propelled through desolate landscapes and empty cities. They struggle to see both ahead and behind them, and yet they keep looking to wrest control of their lives, to make their past, present, and future cohere with meaning ... Not all the stories end on such a clear note. Most are engrossing, some are riveting; they deserve to be republished and translated into English here for the first time, but on occasion I was nagged by a feeling that Molinard was not done with them, that they had been wrenched from her prematurely, as indeed they were. At times, I found myself losing the thread of the plot, or getting stuck in the author’s labyrinthine, groping constructions.
Helen DeWitt
RaveThe RumpusThe novel is itself evidence of genius. Just shy of 500 pages, it is sure to scare off some readers with a shattered, fragmented form and esoteric passages of Japanese syllabaries, German phrases, and Homeric critique. Dewitt’s writing is digressive, daring, and all its own. Some parts are more convincing than others, but every excursion is vividly animated and greatly affecting ... Dewitt’s fiction is lethal, limitless, and economical. She has more fun on the page than most. The Last Samurai is filled with eccentric flourishes: hieroglyphs, excerpts from Icelandic sagas, and long mathematical number equations from Ludo’s diary about his first weeks in school ... The second half of the novel is structured like a detective story, as Ludo searches for a \'benevolent male\'. Each of these stories is heavily laden with the symbolism of a quest, and each bears inventive and mysterious symmetries to the others ... The book’s deep concern is with what we make of opportunity when it presents itself, and the devastating truth that some of us will never recognize that moment.
Tessa Hadley
PositiveThe Rumpus...this book, with its abundance of explicit recurrences, could have benefited from its writer trusting her readers to find the patterns in the pages on their own. However there are plenty of bracing moments in The Past, and the best ones are to be had in the sheer pleasure of reading Hadley’s prose.
