PositiveFull Stop...a general outline of the novel sounds, on its face, a little worn-thin. And, on its face, it is ... The central power-dynamic itself — teacher seems superhuman then is revealed to be a normal human — is, well, boring. But that makes it all the more amazing when Maksik somehow pulls it off ... the inability to share anything resembling a unified experience is both what makes this book interesting, as well as what tests the ideological strength of the Modernism that this book relies so heavily on ... So finally, despite Will’s lessons to his students from Camus, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Sartre, the saddest lesson of all, the most haunting, is always your failure to live up to other peoples expectations, not to mention your own. And the irony is apparent: How can a book succeed when its goal is to show the failures of existential books in teaching practical wisdom? Somehow, it does.
Wolfgang Hilbig, trans. Isabel Fargo Cole
PositiveFull StopWolfgang Hilbig is a cleric of luminous accumulation ... Hilbig doesn’t write stories which develop into political allegories. He writes political allegories which decay into holy relics ... We want this novel to be about us as we see ourselves. We want it to be about our current North American political situation ... But this novel is too close to us to reveal anything but the deepest ontological underpinnings of matter and being. It urges us to keep digging, holes within holes ... mesmerizingly comic ... The Tidings of the Trees ends propulsively ... Hilbig’s novel is a hymn celebrating the disheveled vastness of existence.
Paul Kingsnorth
RaveThe AtlanticThe prose in Beast is taut, bare. There is no specific mention of names of individuals or places, only general terms like 'the city' and 'people.' The vagueness is a stylistic choice, but it also serves Kingsnorth’s philosophical purposes. By keeping the specifics of our dying world at arm’s length, his prose winnows down textual reality to approximate essentials. He doesn’t just show us a man surviving, he uses language to illustrate how humans might define survival in the first place ... The novel, its unique prose raw with austere energy, demands close observation. It opens the reader’s eyes to impending destruction while simultaneously promising that survival is possible. Inevitable, even. Perhaps the specifics of that survival await a more nuanced articulation, but, for now, what Beast proffers is access to the minds and emotional lives of characters who endure.
