MixedFinancial Times (UK)Intimate ... Still, I wanted more — I wanted Baumgartner to unravel, the thread to snap ... Hints of reality intensify the novel’s reflection on what it is to love someone and what a partnership might look like when one half is no longer there. Auster has always been enchanted by memory, chance, echo. Here, the charge of that obsession electrifies.
Claire-Louise Bennett
PositiveFinancial Times (UK)\"The unnamed woman recounts and ruminates on her life through memories, books read or not read, and stories written or half-written ... Bennett moves between \'we\', \'I\' and \'she\'. The shifts feel natural, like changing gears, and it accentuates how memories sit on different levels of intensity or verisimilitude ... Her paragraphs, which can run for pages, are reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard: endless, block structures that skilfully propel themselves onwards. In digression, she controls the reader like Javier Marías, pulling them away, then swinging back ... Sometimes, I worried. The pace slows. Can she pull off the trick? But then she does ... Checkout 19 inches close to what it is to live ... The novel is defiantly told through impulse—the impulse to write a certain character, to read a particular book, to say something or stay quiet—and in this way, a woman, and a writer, emerges.
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Garth Greenwell
RaveFinancial Times (UK)There is something unifying about Greenwell’s prose: long, rhythmic sentences run into each other, with grammar used to build and propel. Rather than break out of prose, speech is contained within. The fabric of Cleanness is textured and multi-faceted—Greenwell’s evocations of human experience are accurately conflicted: desire, shame and love rise again and again ... Greenwell is a master of precision: everyday intimacy is so well wrought that it can feel unbearable to read, as if he cuts too close to the skin. A book’s greatest achievement is often seen as the moment when the reader recognises a part of themselves that they hadn’t yet verbalised. Greenwell’s writing achieves this effortlessly, but in Cleanness he gives something more. In the warmth that rises through his prose there is a poignant optimism. It leaves the reader with the hope that it might spread.
Meena Kandasamy
RaveFinancial Times (UK)... deeply lyrical, with space given for thoughts to build ... With the writer present on the page, every choice feels driven. The result is an exploration of how discrimination can pull and pick at intimacy. Kandasamy’s presence only enhances the fiction; her sense of life and art introducing a never-ending conversation between writer, text and reader ... The reader must make a choice about how to read Exquisite Cadavers — but it isn’t difficult. There is a natural step-back, step-forward between the two sides of the page, like letting yourself be moved by waves. The margins aren’t pedantic, but powerful ruminations on Kandasamy’s role as artist, and the news and research that dominate her mind as she writes ... a book that is slyly funny and profoundly thoughtful. It is common for critics and readers to belittle women by assuming they write out of catharsis rather than to create. Exquisite Cadavers is not just a fierce rebuttal. It’s a work of brilliance.
