RaveThe GuardianThis crisis, which is the crisis of narrative\'s distance from reality, is artistic certainly and cultural probably: but Knausgaard\'s great accomplishment is to show it, pre-eminently, as personal ... There is much to admire in Knausgaard\'s interrogation and, eventually, sacrifice of his own artistic ego, for it frees him to tackle the problems of living as inextricable from the problems of writing ... He captures carefully and lyrically the changing landscape of days spent at the heart of a family, its heavy skies and sudden balminess, its differing terrains, some so featureless and dull and others so challenging, its volcanic love and anger and frustration ... He shows us, by the route of life, that there is no story, and in so doing he finds, at last, authenticity. For that alone, this deserves to be called perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our times.
Yiyun Li
PositiveThe New York Review of BooksWhere Reasons End is a book-long conversation between mother and reimagined child: it is a work, in a sense, of denial ... yet even in its raw subjectivity there is a costiveness that is far from the open candor of [Li\'s previous book] Dear Friend ... Their conversation [the narrator and son Nikolai\'s], being private and particular, leaves the reader with a sense of intrusion ... While Where Reasons End succeeds neither as fiction nor as autobiography, it achieves something perhaps more valuable: a glimpse of a woman artist struggling, in life, to align herself with the truth ... Where Reasons End is a work of respect, the kind of respect few parents are capable of feeling for their child. Li is a far-more-than-good-enough mother.
Sarah Waters
PanThe GuardianWaters dramatises with considerable penetration the new social and sexual ways of being that are emerging with the loss of the old boundaries … This fascinating domestic scenario might have made for an absorbing short novel; but at more than 500 pages long, The Paying Guests has ambitions elsewhere. That these pertain to plot rather than to the development of the novel's core ideas is disappointing, particularly once it becomes clear that the delicate tension between two distinct female types – both of them compromised, yet both yearning for autonomy – in the dawn of the women's rights movement is simply a strategy for fanning the flames as Frances and Mrs Barber progress towards an affair. Waters's plain-spoken description of this relationship immediately begins to undermine the novel's integrity as a period piece: the sexual perspective is designed for the modern reader, and starts to resemble a costume drama.
Elena Ferrante, Trans. by Ann Goldstein
PositiveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewIn Elena and Lila, Ferrante’s modern woman is bisected and given two faces; where in her other works the divided woman speaks to and wrestles with herself, the Neapolitan series externalizes and literalizes those politics to show their almost insurmountable complexity.
