RaveThe Cleveland Review of Books\"The pairings of contradictory emotions—anger and admiration, fear and adoration, toxicity and dedication—give readers emotional whiplash, mimicking Butler’s own as he tries to assimilate the two Mollys: the one he knew and the one he learned about posthumously ... The book becomes a study in the motion of grief—untidy, uncertain, deeply personal—rather than an arrival at any stable truth that he or the reader craves ... Some might criticize him for excusing her abuse of him so readily; others can—and have—accused him of a kind of posthumous abuse of her story. Both arguments have kernels of truth—he even entertains the possibility of both himself ... For in a world so prone to dismissal by way of diagnosis, the Pathologist’s read can feel as sparse as the Biographer’s plodding. There is deep grace in Butler’s quest for an image of Molly beyond her trauma, beyond her pain and lying ... Some might see this as incoherence, ambiguity, or lack of resolution. And it’s true: he hasn’t exactly found a single, stable voice. But he hasn’t come to a conclusion regarding Molly, her character, or her story. Because that’s not actually the point. To conclude anything would be the real betrayal of his and Molly’s story. The point isn’t that he finds the answer, but that he keeps speaking.\
Yoko Tawada, tr. Margaret Mitsutani
PositiveThe Cleveland Review of Books... a broad, kooky, character-driven dystopia ... The book is not a love story between Knut and Hiruko (the two become close friends), but an elegy to the power of language and its ability to evolve along with the changing world. Though the tale is not life-affirming, it is language-affirming ... driven by quantity—many characters are squished into the pages, and broad historical and cultural reflections never leave enough room for any one story to be fleshed out. The effect is a novel that feels, well, a bit scattered.
Anne Carson
PositiveChicago Review of BooksH of H Playbook is much more about Carson’s own obsessions and a Euripidean spirit of subversiveness than fidelity to the content of Euripides’ text. The translation leaps between antiquity and modernity, indulging Carson’s longheld erotic fascination between Herakles and the monster Geryon, and her penchant for anachranisms ... In one beautifully bound book, she has stitched together the Anne Carson starter pack in Euripidean gift wrapping ... H of H glances off Euripides’ original text and runs into infinity on its own, into another time and place ... As illustrator and translator, Carson creates a conversation between the visual and the written, that—like with modernity and antiquity—forces the reader to leap back and forth, while the meaning weaves in between. The illustrations are often swirling forms that mimic one another, bursting out of their own frame and squirming in between dialogue, as if they can’t be held in place by their borders ... It’s difficult to characterize, both beyond any one form and a perfectly singular form. It epitomizes the Carsonian mythology that mixes genre.
