PositiveThe Millions\"This focus on character as conveyed to the reader through narrative voice is a central concern of the novel. Porter uses language and form as a means to convey the spirit of the village, as faithfully as possible, in text ... By giving us this stream of unfiltered human self-involvement, Porter show us the nature of a village as a microcosm of human society, and he shows how difficult it is for people to live with one other ... Max Porter’s Lanny is an attempt to capture a village, entirely, in language, and it does so by trying to represent the village’s breadth of narrative voices. It’s an ultimately empathetic, even humanist project. But its representation isn’t always positive. People are human. They’re unsympathetic, rude, racist, ungenerous, speculative. They beat up pensioners and make false accusations and invite hysteria and sensationalism. They can be judgemental neighhors or maybe self-aggrandizing, polluters or gardeners. But in the act of reading, we’re made a mute witness to them. Like Lanny and Dead Papa Toothwart, or Porter himself, we are made active, careful listeners. In doing so, we give them space to speak.\
Sjón, Trans. by Victoria Cribb
RaveFull Stop...it is undoubtedly Sjón’s masterpiece ... This playfulness is something Sjón is known for, his work often flitting between realism, fairytale, and the surreal. But here, genre is explicitly invoked, leading us to wonder how the titles come into play within the greater structure of the story ... CoDex is more an anthology of stories than it is a straightforward sequence ... by shunning traditional narrative structures, Sjón instead alludes to the greater patchwork of stories that make up world literature ... in CoDex, we really see Sjón’s storytelling style in epic scale — and it’s anything but serious. Important, yes. But as playful, and funny, and experimental as Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita ... in CoDex, he doesn’t mean to treat himself as an authority, but more to remind us that it is readers, not authors, who are in control — which gives us reason for hope, if we choose it.
