RaveBOMB Magazine\"This is not an entirely genderless novel, but words that might betray theirs are avoided altogether. One might think that this only limits the use of certain pronouns and possessive adjectives, but this, as translator Emma Ramadan notes, is symptomatic of how English identifies its subjects’ gender: syntactically. To reduce the radical potential of Garréta’s text to a strategic lack of hims and hers utterly neglects the project’s meticulous character in its original French … A slight change in what may seem as banal as grammatical convention can drastically alter our experience. And herein lies the revelation at the heart of Sphinx, itself an intervention in language’s bodily economy. For Garréta, it just may be possible then that the body occupies the space of language as powerfully as its capacity to produce it.\
Paul Kingsnorth
PositiveBOMB MagazineWhereas Buccmaster, along with the whole of England, is forced into the rest of the world, Edward Buckmaster, who inhabits the same lands one thousand years later in Beast, plucks himself out of it — with no less violence ...Buckmaster's narration becomes increasingly erratic. His isolation is made all the more acute by inexplicable visions and the search for an elusive, catlike beast ...Beast is still engrossing and impressive, and Kingsnorth is at his best when he forces his readers to inhabit a body, to feel the rawness of a mind on the cusp of radical change ... Buccmaster's world ends with integration and modernization, Buckmaster's through a retreat from those same things, plus the vengeful resurgence of nature.
