RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)This is a speculative fiction with the brevity and depth of a fable ... A compelling fable about the nature of fiction, including the fiction that is memoir: about what it can and cannot tell us, and what we must decide to do with that imperfect knowledge.
Brigitte Reimann, trans. Lucy Jones
PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Jones’s translation ably captures the frankness of Elisabeth’s voice: the fast transitions, sensual visual imagery and careful ironic distance. At its best the prose evokes a kind of flickering street photography ... Only in the novel’s latter half, which moves from a delineation of the Arendt family’s history to a focus on Elisabeth’s struggle to reconcile her artistic vision with party ideology, does Reimann slip into the clichés of socialist realism ... Siblings is too good a novel to be read merely for the way in which it reflects on the limited political horizons of our era; but if you are looking to imagine your way beyond them, it gestures to a picture of a future that never was.
Sjón, Tr. Victoria Cribb
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Like all good murder mysteries, Red Milk opens with the discovery of a corpse ... What follows in this slim, swift novel is the story of how this body ended up on that carriage, associated with the belief system implied by the drawing ... Yet the form of the novel makes this difficult: Red Milk is no Bildungsroman of a young fascist, and it largely eschews any representation of Gunnar’s thoughts. His actions are described, his letters presented, but his inner psychology remains largely off-limits. If this seems intentional...Red Milk also fails to imagine the inner experience of one man’s slide from such normality to the worst kind of evil. Or perhaps it refuses the act of empathy this would entail to make Sjón’s point. For what the novel does show is the intensely social nature of right-wing extremism ... It is a way of being together in the world; and a collective commitment to destroying the world of others.
Jon Fosse
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)...a style that tends towards torrents of unpunctuated sentences, relentless blasts against conventional syntax and the reader’s patience. Fosse calls this \'slow prose\', yet this doesn’t necessarily make for slow reading; you can fight a current, trying to cling to what you know, or you can let go and take the risk of drowning ... This lack of sincerity and self-belief is what, paradoxically, makes Fosse far more sincere than his student Knausgaard, and indeed many an author of confidently narcissistic autofiction. Fosse’s style makes demands on its reader. And at a time when the scope of so many novels has narrowed to what their thinly disguised authors ate for breakfast, Fosse’s belief that writing about mundane details can lead us away from the kitchen table and to the discovery of \'something that silently speaks in and behind the words and sentence\' makes his Septology , for all its self-doubt, worth every risk of reading.
