The emotional intensity created by Boström Knausgaard—who has previously published stories and a collection of poems—recalls Sylvia Plath, but her spare, accelerating modern myth owes something to the poet/classicist Anne Carson's novels in verse ... Some readers will be put off by the combination of lyricism and distress but I love the way Boström Knausgaard invests 'Dad'— one of the key words of our lives—with fresh power. In Anna's mouth, this simple, multitudinous word reminds me of Flaubert ... there's levity ... Nevertheless, the violence—of language, blood, mania – assaults the reader as Anna plumbs the depths of a condition which sounds similar to bipolar disorder. This novella cannot be read quickly, its psychological range and febrile prose demand attentiveness. It takes skill and imagination to describe extreme emotions in ways to which everybody can relate but that's what Boström Knausgaard achieves in this short, piercing book.

What's remarkable about The Helios Disaster is how lucid Anna's voice and account is. Despite being lost in a haze, despite barely being able to communicate with those around her—often she is unable or unwilling to talk; later she is barely capable of doing so because of the medications she's given—she expresses herself clearly, observing rationally even as she often remains uncomprehending. Those around her rarely can get through to her, and she can rarely explain herself, yet she conveys both others and herself in clear and precise terms—if also often childishly (or mentally unstably) unable to make connections. Everything may be a fog, yet it's also razor-sharply delineated ... an unusual novel of mental instability and of childhood, presented in a striking voice. Boström Knausgård handles mental illness well, putting the reader in Anna's lucid but damaged mind, and while much of the novel can seem abrupt, the impressive, compact narrative does more than enough.

Solitude is in this novel purely a torment, the painful consequence of Anna’s separation from her father, whom she imagines to be the one person who understands her true nature. Ms. Boström Knausgård is good at evoking the fragility that can afflict even the most loving families. Her sentences, translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles, are short, dry and brittle, like tinder on the verge of combustion. The writing then takes fire in the desperate and disturbing portrait of mental illness ... The mythology, on the other hand, is vague and confusing. I wasted far too much time trying to figure out what Athena has to do with any of this—the answer seems to be very little. Ersatz allusions to antiquity litter the narrative, interrupting a powerful story in the most needless way: by goading the reader to stop to look things up on Wikipedia.

... an exercise in fantastic metaphor and allegory, with a strong mythological core and vivid imagery throughout. The strangeness, originality, and supreme gentleness of the narrator's inner world contrast sharply with the more recognizable, though not in all respects ordinary world into which she is forced. This, combined with her quiet determination to find her father and the increasingly astonishing events that occur, all add up to form a surprisingly modern portrait of longing and the possibility of homecoming ... The prose, though tightly wound and highly lyrical, is as demanding as it is lucid, to say nothing of the story itself, which progresses less through the events related than layers of the young protagonist's psyche and spirit. But there is an unmistakable rhythm to the Knausgård's narrative, even something like a musical key, and The Helios Disaster is virtually without a misplayed note. A slight deferment of judgment is necessary, but once granted, the world as described here envelops the reader in a way that only a very strong artist can produce ... but it is very much a first novel. There are too many undeveloped characters, too many unanswered questions. All of these, to be sure, stem not from laziness but from the overwhelming force of the central figure of Anna, but the book nevertheless is stained by being simply too rough around the edges. But what is strong here is extraordinary.

The story is tightly, cleverly organised around a central idea: to show how Anna’s perceptive, disturbed mind struggles to impose some kind of mental order and, finally, fails. It is through Anna’s eyes that we see the other characters but her observations are limited by her lack of real interest in them. Internal monologues are difficult to sustain, but the writing is accomplished and the author’s passionate involvement with her protagonist illuminates what it is like to slide irresistibly away from reality.

In brilliant, harrowing pages of deep interiority, Knausgård describes Anna’s fever dream of alienation; Anna is desperate for love and confounded by it, and chronically incapable of connecting with those who might provide it. Knausgård’s bluntly surreal style—she is also a poet— suits Anna’s vibrant, tormented imagination ... Tidy endings are nowhere to be found; Knausgård instead gratifies by portraiture, in her thrilling conception of a young goddess on earth.

The somber, flat tone of the narrative (ably maintained by translator Willson-Broyles) gives the reader plenty of room to interpret Anna as mad or misunderstood, and Boström Knausgård’s imagery is piercing ... the latter pages of the narrative become mordant, a touch repetitively. But it’s a moving trip to an emotional bottom. A flinty, lyrical, and storm-clouded study of loss.