RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Margarita Khemlin’s masterful debut novel Klotsvog, which was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize in 2009 and is now brought to an English-speaking audience by Lisa C. Hayden, demonstrates just how unsuccessful love can be – particularly when it’s trapped in the antisemitic Soviet mechanism ... Maya’s soap-operatic life is delivered via a series of Vonnegut-like refrains...and with a Dostoevskean psychological precision. Khemlin also mixes Sovietisms with skaz – a style of breathless, conversational storytelling, exemplified by authors such as Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. The storytelling is sumptuous throughout, and Klotsvog is also memorable for its bold grasp on the legacy of anxiety. \'We didn’t have anybody’s examples to follow for love\' Maya comments in the opening pages. Between the suffering of the past and the fear of the future, Khemlin shows how our relationship with love can be determined by our reckoning with ancestral pain.
Lina Wolff, Trans. by Saskia Vogel
RaveThe Times Literary SupplementWolff’s second novel, which won Sweden’s August Prize, has now been translated as The Polyglot Lovers by Saskia Vogel – an impeccable pairing, given Vogel’s previous form with disrobers of the misogynist regalia (see her translations of Lena Andersson, Karolina Ramqvist and Rut Hillarp) ... The novel moves around itself with a sort of ceremonial power. Recurring elements, such as fire, deftly gauge the temperature of female seething ... The novel as a whole is enveloped in a somewhat gothic, sensuous atmosphere, reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier. The Polyglot Lovers is a quiet rapture – unsparing, startling, mesmeric, and told with the soberest of grins.
Juliet Escoria
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... wildly gripping ... The disorientation and alienation of mental illness becomes an interactive textual presence – at times poetic, at others darkly comic, and often both ... a work of frightening charisma – effortless and unbearable, poetic and hilarious – a plunge into a disintegrating identity told by way of lapses – of judgement, of lucidity, of hope. Juliet is continually swallowed up by the schisms of chemical imbalance, and her author counterpart is persistently fishing her out to tell her story.
