A manic treatise on travel and transformation ... for a novel guided by delirium, Lord is remarkably suspenseful and assured. Darkened by reflections on death and visions of failure, the novel makes depressive comedy from displacement. Even the cover strikes a visual rhyme with its beat-up bowler hat, a nod to Beckett.

... absolutely unsettling...both in the ways that it depicts alienated psyches and in the ways that it disorients the reader ... summons tension due to its sheer indescribability—as the reader is forced to question whether this ambiguity is in the service of some larger plot revelation, or if the ambiguity itself is the point ... To say that this novel operates under dream logic would be to sell it short: It has a distinctly surreal logic, but 'dreamlike' isn’t the first word that comes to mind when thinking of it. Still, the blend of precision and abandon with which Noll spins this tale is never less than disconcerting. The result is a novel that creates new rules and surveys new fictional terrain as it goes.

... the book is short, less than two hundred pages, but contains no chapter or section breaks for the reader or the narrator to catch their breath. Scenes change quickly, and there are several hours- or days-long time jumps, often in a single paragraph. This fast-paced structure feels intentional, however, or at least matches the urgent tone of the book. As the narrator’s mind is unraveling, he spends a lot of time wandering the city without motivation or destination. In matching this purposelessness, the story swirls and loops in increasingly unpredictable and nonsensical patterns, following the narrator on his delirious wanderings ... This is a book driven more by philosophical and thematic questions than it is by narrative impulse. Nonetheless, Lord is engaging, if not always intuitive or understandable. There are multiple scenes to make you gasp ... reminiscent of Lynchian and Kafkaesque traditions, physically trim but intellectually overflowing; though perhaps best enjoyed with a healthy appetite for confusion, Lord is delicious: provocative and evocative and unforgettable.

Part of the novel’s challenge is the fact that his actions suggest a man who may or may not be connected to who he once was—or, really, any stable reality. Although his days unfold with increasing delirium, he maintains a continuous internal monologue, observing his every action with intellectual regard ... Caught in the mind of a man unmoored, Noll’s novel bears witness to a grotesque second birth. All attempts to renovate, reincarnate, and, ultimately, escape the body’s animal demands only point to greater forces—not only those of fear, arousal, hunger, and health, but self-conception and self-contemplation, too.

Those who already know Adam Morris’s translations will be familiar with the way that Noll moves a story forward: with unexpected sideways leaps, murkily signposted transitions, and above all the juxtaposition of episodes whose import, one guesses, might have remained enigmatic even for the author himself. A reader of such material has to work—and to work even a little too hard, on occasion—to avoid losing the thread altogether ... Equally, those who were happy to meet the demands will be familiar with the rewards for persevering ... given that in Lord each of these regimes of power seems to emit from a center as absent as is the elusive academic, one can discern a coherent and haunting political argument running through the narrative ... Ultimately, it’s not quite clear what question or questions the text is primarily wrestling with. It concludes with a sequence that feels like the solution to a problem, though to which problem among the many raised and then dropped in the course of the book, sometimes extremely fleetingly, it’s hard to tell. Not that this matters: as I’ve said, Noll constructs his fictions by means of a series of left turns, and one shouldn’t be surprised to find that logic carried through to the very end, sometimes to a surprisingly satisfying effect, as in Quiet Creature, and sometimes, as here, playing the more disquieting role of opening up questions barely larval in the preceding narrative.

... surreal, audacious ... When something shocking happens to the Englishman, the narrator thinks, in a moment of surprising clarity: 'I was a survivor in bloom.' Though the narrator is referring to the specific horrors he’s suffered, in Noll’s capable hands, it becomes a statement on the lives humans lead. This is a cunning, memorable novel.