PositiveIrish Times (IRE)What is most intriguing about this autobiographical work is its three-dimensionality, offering a portrait of complicated characters trying to make sense of their life in a society they idealise and resist, as they feel it begin to work against their dream of an egalitarian utopia ... The narrative, for the most part, is an intense and painfully intimate affair ... Although Reimann is not always above placing political talking points in her characters’ mouths, the book largely steers clear of black and white conclusions, reminding us, as art should, that life, no matter where it is lived, will always operate through shades of grey.
Brigitte Reimann, trans. Lucy Jones
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)What is most intriguing about this autobiographical work is its three-dimensionality, offering a portrait of complicated characters trying to make sense of their life in a society they idealise and resist, as they feel it begin to work against their dream of an egalitarian utopia ... Although Reimann is not always above placing political talking points in her characters’ mouths, the book largely steers clear of black and white conclusions, reminding us, as art should, that life, no matter where it is lived, will always operate through shades of grey.
Anna Della Subin
PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)It is fascinating stuff, and Subin marshals her enormous arsenal of facts to compelling effect, even if the sometimes florid prose requires a fair amount of readerly heavy lifting. All the same, her contentions are thoughtful and subtle, and for this reviewer it was the final section of the publication that proved most impactful.
Nesrine Malik
PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)[Malik] presents her case persuasively, with admirable clarity, and in doing so cuts through a lot of the messy, often befuddling noise ... I welcomed Malik’s frank refusal to engage in debate with the myths she considers. Instead, she deconstructs them for the fictions they are ... Malik is a clear, accessible writer, and her book is well-researched and thorough; her tone neither ironic nor sneering. To an extent, this work is also a call to arms.
Olivia Laing
RaveIrish Times (IRE)The formula works for her ... She adopts a similar approach – an adeptly braided mix of cultural criticism, biography, and memoir – to explore the body from multiple perspectives, most particularly as a potential locus of freedom in what continues to be a constricted world ... Reich did try to change the world, but then the world beat him down. He is at the heart of Laing’s investigations, but her course also takes her through the lives and work of others who tried – and so often failed – to find bodily freedom ... As a writer, she does what she does extremely well, tripping lightly over her meld of genres, unafraid of independent thought and criticism, but unafraid, also, of nuance, uncertainty, and empathy for polarising characters such as Reich, Dworkin, even Freud ... She reminds me, that way, of a writer such as Maggie Nelson, turning her considerations around and round, holding them up, looking at them in the light.
Mark Solms
PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)... probing, complex ... For the lay reader, personal anecdotes such as these, along with the case studies Solms draws on, help ground our understanding of his thesis, which can be dense and presented in abstract, scientific language that is not always easy to process ... Solms can demand a lot of his reader. Although he is able to write clearly and descriptively, those without a background in science will have to work hard to understand ... As best I could, I stuck with him, and learned something along the way ... Surely this gives us much to think about.
Eula Biss
PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)... timely ... a work that also feels as if it will outlast this moment ... [Biss\'s] sentences have retained a poet’s precision, if not the same wonder. Her writing, compressed here into short, brisk sections with titles such as Work, Art, Capitalism, is clean, taught, clarifying, satisfying for this reader in its brevity and accuracy, even if it didn’t quite make my heart ache.
Eula Biss
PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)It’s a work that...feels as if it will outlast this moment. As with all of Biss’s books of prose (this is her third), Having and Being Had is not so much an analysis of a situation as a personal response to it ... her sentences have retained a poet’s precision, if not the same wonder. Her writing, compressed here into short, brisk sections with titles such as Work, Art, Capitalism, is clean, taught, clarifying, satisfying for this reader in its brevity and accuracy, even if it didn’t quite make my heart ache ... So what to do? Biss is hardly the type to come to any firm conclusions: her style has always been nuanced, musing, calling attention to social and economic inconsistencies while acknowledging how she remains enmeshed within them. But the book does arrive at a resolution of sorts, with Biss making the decision to sell her work into the economy she is so fearful of, in order to buy herself the time she so desires ... her trade-off feels pretty close to having, rather than being had.
Heather Christle
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)...a text constructed alongside crying rather than precisely from it, a work of free association across themes and ideas that mimics the writer’s conclusions regarding our tears ... Christle, who has published several poetry collections...is poised and precise with her sentences, and even though the book is the result of copious research (there are 198 endnotes), that heavy lifting is integrated lightly into the text ... As with other books of this ilk – Maggie Nelson’s Bluets comes to mind – Christle’s work is both rangy and focused ... There is a danger, of course, that Christle’s text pays too much homage to the work of Nelson or Offill; that it fails to mark out its own ground. On the other hand, if, as some have suggested, little books made up of interconnected fragments – often those that foreground the experience of contemporary motherhood in a disjointed world – present as the radical form for our era, then there is surely room for many such works ... These are books that remind us – when we need it most – that we move in relationship rather than individual adventure, that the tender connections between our tears are all we really have to hold.
