PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)\"Memory is not marked on a calendar or in police reports but is instead a constantly re-played series of remembrances, or \'re-remembrances.\' That the self exists in narrative form lies at the centre of Blueberries, as Savage explores the sites of identity—trauma, gender, class, religion, the body—in clear, rhythmic prose ... Blueberries is a book of reflections, in the sense that Savage appears to us reflected in the events and objects she describes. It is not a memoir. She is writing about the self, or selves, and how they are contained, whether in space or time or the trappings of culture.
Maria Stepanova tr. Sasha Dugdale
PositiveThe New Statesman (UK)Some books are like museums. They offer an architecture but let you wander. Chapters, like gallery rooms, are adjacent and suggestive of order, but they read like a series of collections. In Memory of Memory is such a book, a repository of cultural artefacts, curated so that you will ask: how does memory inhabit these objects? ... we see into the heart of this textual cabinet of curiosities. Stepanova has written a book about her family that is not about her family, but about the urge to remember, to memorialise, and the dangers that lie that way.
