PositiveStorgy MagazineThe charm of Van Llewyn’s writing lies in the simplicity of the language. You’re not expecting anything bad to happen. You’re dancing along in the half-poetic-haze of short sentences, well-chosen words from the less obscure end of the vocabulary range, and a wonderful rhythm of punctuation– highly sophisticated starts and stops ... In this novella everything is squeezed, a country closing in around one’s neck ... Bottled Goods is testament to boundaries of all kinds, to those that should be crossed, those that shouldn’t, those that are crossed without permission, in secret, and those that can never be re-crossed once traversed, the ones that dissolve by the very act of crossing them. Once you smash the bottle, once it rains on the resultant pieces, there is no longer any bottle there.
