RaveThe GuardianFishman balances brilliantly on the treacherous tightrope of using language to explore the inadequacy of language ... It is the details that make Fishman’s novel convincing, from the marinated peppers with buckwheat honey at the grandmother’s funeral, to the vivid semi-inventions of her backstory: a baby choked to prevent discovery, a boy’s trousers soaked in fear ... A Replacement Life is an elegy for loss (of families, health, sanity) and a plea for compassion. It raises serious questions about identity and history. Comically human flaws are juxtaposed with a violent, ineluctable past, and survivors are \'the walking wounded\', psychologically and physically. \'We are talking about people I love,\' says Slava. \'We are talking about people who have suffered.\'
Margarita Khemlin, Trans. by Lisa Hayden
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksKlotsvog is a devastating, bleakly comic novel about life in the Soviet Union. Published in Russian in 2009, it has been skillfully rendered by Lisa Hayden ... Hayden perfectly reproduces the awkward, traumatized clichés with the help of which Maya narrates her own life in one long, strange, chapter-less confessional ... Khemlin’s use of tiny incidents to convey the permanence and loneliness of trauma is part of the novel’s brilliance ... Language is also at the center of Khemlin’s heartbreaking exploration of Jewish identity in Klotsvog ... Maya’s struggles as a woman are horribly familiar: competing demands, internalized beauty standards, the mundane frustrations of cooking, ironing, tidying up ... In an apparently small-scale drama, Khemlin raises existential human questions. \'Is life worth living?\' Maya asks herself halfway through the book. Khemlin’s trick is to cram these questions between formulaic understatements ... The fact that Maya’s unspoken agonies peek out from behind platitudes makes them almost funny as well as freshly painful. In giving voice to this complex, wounded character, Khemlin invites us to empathize even as we judge and to better understand our own common, terrified, irrational humanity.
Ahmet Altan
PositiveThe GuardianThese stories are set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the final months of the Ottoman empire: the atmosphere of autocratic paranoia parallels present day Turkish politics ... Istanbul is a powerful presence in the novel, beautifully evoked ... Tiny incidents represent the larger panorama \'just as we can see microbes in a drop of blood.\' Altan uses a Tolstoyan combination of the epic and the intimate to explore questions of national identity and historical narrative.
