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.