RaveThe Guardian (UK)... the final chapter is a deft triumph of linguistic contradiction ... grief is sensation, and Adichie gives an eloquent account of how it hurts: the air turns to glue as she gasps at it, her sides ache, she cries with her tired muscles. She has a bitter tongue, a weight on her chest, her insides are dissolving. Grief is in her flesh and muscles and organs; she is eyeball to eyeball to it, so close she cannot make out its shape ... At the same time – language groping after language – she picks up and then discards a series of different metaphors, over and over again saying the same thing (no no no no): her father’s death is an undoing, an unravelling, a solidifying, a drowning, a scattering of selfhood; she is in the centre of a violent churning and she is on the outside of her self, looking in and calling herself \'you\' ... a moving account of a daughter’s sorrow and it is also a love letter to the one who has gone. Adichie wants him back; she wants to rescue him from death and to tell him once again how much she adored him. She is saying don’t go and she is saying goodbye and she is also saying sorry – for the writing of grief is to acknowledge an ending and, thus, as Jacques Derrida had it, as soon as you write, you are asking for forgiveness.
Ingeborg Bachmann, Trans. by Philip Boehm
RaveThe Guardian (UK)In the astonishing desolation and wonder that is Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, first published in 1971, there is no certain narrative, but there are many, deeply internalised, stories ... And yet for all its terror and dread, its death-haunted self-interrogations, Malina is never a depressing novel. Instead, it is eerie, vulnerable, brave and captivating. With its long ribbons of digressive sentences – sometimes looping over a page – and its echoes and rhythms that bring coherence where there is none, it performs a task that it declares impossible: retrieves a self from the rubble, redeems the corrupted act of writing, becomes its own unwritten \'beautiful book\'.
Ariel Levy
RaveThe GuardianShe writes in order to make a narrative out of the chaos she creates, so that she is simultaneously in control and out of it ... In keeping with her febrile nature, Levy’s prose is dynamic, molten with verbs and with images of light, movement and change ... Memoirs are popular at the moment, challenging the traditional, less mobile biography. Levy’s is a breathtakingly good example of how this form can be deft, light-footed and audacious.
