RaveNew Statesman (UK)Deliciously uncinematic ...The events keep coming, but the quiet moments that receive such loving attention are the real treasure ... Some of the book’s funniest and most pleasurable moments come when the erudite, charming Dave allows himself a cattily polite barb ... Grand.
Rachel Cusk
MixedThe New StatesmanI have nothing against the documentation of misery, by Cusk or anybody else. But I do struggle with expressions of emotion that feel inorganic and bloodless, which Cusk’s sometimes do, despite the intensity they contend with ... No doubt there are things I am missing but, having trudged through Parade once, I read it again, and so can be confident that it is my least successful encounter with Cusk yet – and not for lack of trying on my part ... Cusk’s brilliance on a sentence level is as dazzling as ever ... This is Cusk at her most exciting: capturing succinctly relations between people that are usually both too generic and too complex to summarise. Such sentences are almost aphoristic, but not at all glib – instead completely specific. Her work is littered with such striking moments, clear and fine as the chime of a bell, but the reader must endure a great deal of white noise to find them. Much more of my time was spent despairing at Cusk’s intentionally opaque approach to storytelling ... The novel as a whole is characterised by an atmosphere of deliberate withholding, which feels more tiresome and wasteful than provocatively disruptive.
Colm Toibin
RaveThe Telegraph (UK)[A] grand achievement ... A part of Tóibín’s genius is the lack of visible effort with which he draws us in, so seamless that we barely register our new surroundings by the time we’re consumed ... A rarity. After I began, I could barely stand to do anything else but finish it ... There is a kind of powerful calm in this novel, both on a sentence level and in the stately pace of the unfurling story. You feel that this is the destined culmination of a remarkable, lustrous career; you can experience not just your own enjoyment as a reader, but also Tóibín’s in the writing of it.
Vigdis Hjorth
RaveThe New StatesmanHjorth’s precision becomes a quietly devastating mimicry of the effects of trauma, and of ambiguous and conflicting memories, on a human being ... The particulars of Bergljot’s experiences are revealed with immaculate restraint, earning Hjorth comparisons with Ibsen, but as she goes further into the past, that restraint transcends its beauty and becomes profoundly sad, the relationship of style to the pain it is describing growing more disturbing. The tension and reserve begin to seem not just a formal choice but a necessary way of being that has been bred in the narrator by the physiological imprint of trauma ... The insistent clarity, and the avoidance of gratuitous emotion – something like a gorgeously written police report at times – show the indiscriminate self-awareness one witnesses in traumatised adults ... Part of what makes this such an extraordinary book is Bergljot’s awareness of the competing pain that surrounds her, including that of the people who caused her own pain.
Lisa Taddeo
RaveNew StatesmanThough I found it depressing in many ways, its very presence—the fact a book like this could be written and published—is profound and hopeful. It’s a flawed, messy work of art, and of inventive journalism. Its style is conversational and compulsively readable, but occasionally veers into overly florid, distracting language ... Maggie is the only one of the three [women] whose surroundings feel fully realized and whose location is specified. The other two, though just as vivid as people, live in vaguer settings ... It is quietly thrilling to read certain parts about being a girl and woman in love or in lust, things that are so fundamentally familiar to my own experience but which I have never read articulated quite so plainly ... this is a very simple book, as suggested by the title, but its simplicity is what makes it so important. To spend years on these ordinary stories, as Taddeo has done, is an act of generosity and faith. It’s what storytelling is for, why we need it: to lend grace to parts of life that are easily diminished, to grant value to experiences that are shameful and humiliating. This is an unusual, startling and gripping debut. It feels to me like the kind of bold, timely, once-in-a-generation book that every house should have a copy of, and probably will before too long.
Jamie Quatro
PositiveThe White Review (UK)... [a] thrilling, maddening debut novel ... Quatro writes wonderful prose. Many of the details of Maggie’s domestic life with Thomas rang around my head for days after I read them ... a fresh, startling thing, a strange and beautiful book I could imagine pressing into the hands of my women friends. So why, then, was I also so bothered by it? Why did I have to go back to the beginning as soon as I finished, to search out clues for my unrest? How had I come away from a work of such intensity with the feeling of anticlimax? ... Maybe it is because women’s desire has always been so secretive and smuggled that it is often spoken of in awed tones of this kind, that this religious ecstasy seems fitting, even if it grates on me—but grate it did. I found myself wanting both more and less from this book, less of the earnest theatricality of desire, more reason to believe in it ... In the end many of the criticisms I feel most keenly, and feel most conflicted about voicing, come from a place which proves Fire Sermon\'s necessity; a book like this is so rare, relatively speaking, that I wanted it to do everything ... the final pages...and much else which is so good here, make me grateful for Fire Sermon, despite its frustrations, and hopeful that it will eventually be just one book of a great many which speak seriously about woman’s desire.
