RaveFinancial Times[A] slender but poignant portrait of a mind losing its grip ... The Swimmers is a subtler tale, one that reads like a riddle in parts — we cannot gather up all the pieces of the characters’ broken lives, but rather bear witness to their disorientation ... Divided into two very different halves, The Swimmers is structured a bit like a lateralized brain, with distinctly rational and emotional sides in melancholy dialogue with one another ... The prose is arid and disciplined as it describes the progressively complex dynamics that emerge between the pool’s habitual users. With skill she also teases out slivers of the swimmers’ irrationality ... It’s a laser-controlled piece of writing that slyly turns into allegory with the arrival of a problem at the pool — a crack ... One of the marvels of The Swimmers is its unshowy portrayal of the immense drama inherent in losing the mind before the body has expired. But perhaps even more impressive is its respect for the general confusion of living — a human condition which is omnipresent, with or without the ravages of dementia.
Bernhard Schlink
PositiveFinancial Times (UK)Though there are fragments of hope in this story, Schlink cloaks it in unmistakable melancholy ... With fine authorial care, Schlink leads us from the child Olga standing at a window in her hometown near Breslau...to her hospital deathbed in Heidelberg ... Much of this relationship, which does not progress to marriage, is relayed through letters between the two, skilfully deployed by Schlink to show the naivety and also the callousness of both parties ... Schlink frames the novel as a search for meaning, which dances in Olga between a multitude of timeframes and territories ... At the novel’s midpoint, when its energy appears to be waning, Schlink reveals the extent of his narrative control.
Jan Morris
PositiveThe Financial Times... the paradox of Thinking Again : a mind organising for death, and a writer putting an elegant shoulder to it. Morris writes, indomitably, every day, even when there is only food and television to report, but always with a monumental presence — The End — close by. As immovable as the view of Mount Snowdon from her kitchen window, death inspires philosophically vivid inquiry, set alongside events that are either borrowed (for example from America, where Trump is sensationally elected) or banal, such as a summery drive to a favourite pub that has unexpectedly run dry of Guinness ... grounded by sweetly undramatic, comic and precise pleasures: breadsticks eaten by the fire with tea, a daily 1,000-pace walk, and the faint innocence of Welsh rural life, its seaside tableaux providing a melancholy “perfection”, to which nothing more can be added. This is a book full of improbable but touching frictions: mortality and marmalade are considered on the same page, and memories of cold war Moscow elide with respectful appreciations of Tiger Woods ... Morris’s love for Wales provides perhaps the surest, most personal comfort, in face of a universal difficulty, an awareness that days both create and oxidise a life, whether under Venetian skies or Welsh ones.
Yuko Tsushima Trans. by Geraldine Harcourt
PositiveThe Financial TimesAn uncannily subtle writer, Tsushima plays with light to point to obscurities ... Tsushima portrays the battle to keep going as a fight for life itself. Tsushima casts death as a recurring character who is always close to the action ... Where Ferrante is visceral in her portrayal of grief and disappointment, Tsushima is no less dark, but far more abstract.
