Readers should begin with the memoir: It is both better and makes better sense of the fictional part ... Both sections play with form, both are filled with philosophical reflections, both resist linear narrative as they explore our messy desires, compulsions and repetitions ... Apt ... For all its delightful circularity, The Möbius Book does approach a terminus of sorts.
The Möbius Book does not reject the idea of fiction so much as demonstrate how fiction and nonfiction are in constant dialogue, how each is never entirely what it says it is. Just as distorted echoes of the memoir can be found in the fictional half—the seeping blood from next door; the accidental drowning of the young couple—so the scenes that are ostensibly true must be fiction to an extent, the curated memories of a subjective narrator ... It is equally a moving documentary of personal loss, a meditation on the fragility of identity and a critique of the struggle women still face in being heard.
Enticing and frustrating ... I read the novella first and found it occasionally over the top but largely exhilarating in its meticulous construction and literary flamboyance. Turning to the memoir and experiencing much of the same material in brief sections of rambling reflection was a bit of a letdown. Lacey’s account of her religious childhood and the impact of its loss is compelling and moving ... A book that conjoins fiction and memoir to tell different versions of the same story is one way to punk the punking and eschew an ending. But ultimately, its fiction still wins.
Lacey isn’t scorching earth—she’s sifting it, flinging fistfuls of dirt and thought at us ... The fiction is shorter, noirish and elliptical. Was yoking it to the fiction an organic, creative act—whatever that is, we’re maybe meant to consider—or a clever packaging solution for two not-quite stand-alones? ... Their interlocked stories drip with aphorism...defy summary and might all be a fever dream anyway ... The Möbius Book invites the reader to consider the overlaps between its two parts, an exercise both frustrating—all that turning back, forth and upside down—and exhilarating, because Lacey is imaginative and whimsical when considering reality, and sees truth in make-believe.
Hybrid only in the sense that the first part of the book is invented and the second is true, with the former starting inside the front cover and printed right-side up and the latter starting inside the back cover and printed upside down. The experience of twisting the book around to keep reading does, for a moment, make it resemble a Möbius strip, but The Möbius Book isn’t endless. It doesn’t even end without resolution. It’s just half a weak novel and half a weak memoir, stuck together as if one might improve the other ... Corny ... Lacey sketches her characters too vaguely for either of them to say something precise.
Deeply serious and engrossingly playful, and it lavishly rewards serious, playful attention ... Lacey is fascinated by literary form and by the metaphors for literary form, finding fiction at once a constraint and a space for play ... The two modes of the book, which I hesitate to call fiction and memoir because neither is wholly committed to realism or reality, undermine each other, with images and anecdotes reappearing in transmuted form ... The questions are constant, implicit, teasing, elaborated rather than answered in the dark mirror of life writing.
For those of us who’ve lost faith in fiction at some point in our lives as writers or readers, Lacey’s highwire act of juxtaposition in The Möbius Book serves to rekindle our conviction in the value of its ability to reveal rather than to obscure the mysteries of human life ... Multifaceted and endlessly rewarding.
In style, the sections are different with one more successfully executed than the other. It is tempting, then, to write off this hybrid project as a gimmick or a larky homage to the mad textual experiments of BS Johnson, but it’s more intriguing than that ... Sadly, her meditations on faith feel too erratic to make this a serious work about religious belief in the modern age. Her confusion about God is more powerful when transmuted into fiction in the novella section ... The novella cleverly weaves together many of the loose strands of experience and thought from the memoir to create a work about betrayal, self-sabotage and rupture, which is more controlled and compelling ... Still, as flighty and self-indulgent as the memoir is, it is a useful behind-scenes companion piece to the novella—a teasing glimpse of the writer at work ... The Möbius Book has its frustrations, but it’s a project that makes you think deeply about how we construct stories to make sense of our lives.
In The Möbius Book, Lacey casts herself as the object of projection and analyzes her shifting responses to the fictions others make for her ... The drama of the memoir side is most palpable in the moments when these purgings happen without conscious effort or warning—when we catch the author surprising herself, when she describes how the act of putting a particular idea, phrase, or feeling in the head, mouth, or body of a character allows her to suddenly recognize that that very thing has always been present in herself, concealed or disavowed. The fiction, likewise, is deepened and intensified upon rereading (like a Möbius strip, you have to go all the way around twice to complete the circuit), when we are compelled to imagine Lacey writing the text and arriving at such moments of spontaneous insight ... This constant return to the scene of writing—this demand that we grasp the text not just as a written thing (this being the demand of classical postmodernism, with its delight in self-reflexive textual play) but also as a writing, as the product of a writer struggling with her material, encoding that struggle into the text itself, and producing some unaccountable hybridity in excess of the 'real'—is Lacey’s great breakthrough.
A tedious work of prose ... Baggy and vast ... The book, to me at least, is the memoir. The novella feels like ephemera ... Gimmicky ... It is so preoccupied with its conceptual project that it forgets to be funny. It is a humorless, completely self-serious book. It lacks the sense of playfulness that experimental prose demands in order to be legible. At its worst, it panders to us ... Exhausting to read ... I couldn’t help but feel like [the] references...exist to pad Lacey’s prose. To dazzle us without actually doing so. They take away from the book’s brutal emotional reality ... And this is what is actually dazzling about The Möbius Book,the moments when it does not speak in generalities about suffering and instead opts to be plain and specific ... The Möbius Book is at its best when Lacey dutifully transcribes these banal horrors. These are the moments I found the most truly heartbreaking. When the book stops trying to hurl its big ideas at us and instead truly functions as a diary.
As a novelist, Lacey is one of the most experimental, fascinating, boundary-pushing of her generation ... As a memoirist, Lacey also remembers every detail. She is an incredibly anecdotal writer ... In a tilted world, there it is: memoir and fiction, a two-sided book that needs to be flipped, a story told about life, about experience, from both perspectives – life and fiction – which provide two ways to insist on trying again and again to find the words.
Lacey pulls off this looping-of-perspectives with an omniscient third-person moving dreamlike between four dimensions: Marie’s grief and Edie’s, past and present ... Lacey’s details are interchangeable as boutique Legos. She takes this endless fungibility to its logical conclusion and replicates the details in her own repeating memory, and while the result is a brilliantly structured book, this also has the effect of ensuring that nothing new ever happens in it.
The two parts occasionally echo each other across pages and time—the Lacey of Book B is akin to Edie of Book A—offering Möbius strip-like views of a life. Experimental in its style and heartfelt in its tone, The Möbius Book asks readers to take part in its experiment by choosing whether to begin with A or B.
A lissome philosophical experiment that blurs the lines of (auto)fiction through its two narratives ... This potentially divisive work is sure to lure fans of high-brow and mesmerizing writing by R.O. Kwon and Sarah Manguso.
A tricksy, compulsively readable meditation on desire ... The interest may be keenest among readers who recognise the literary cameos that float through the pages. But once you have read both parts – whichever way around – the structure generates broader intrigue: if the thematic overlap suggests the extent to which a novelist feeds on personal experience, does it also perhaps hint that fiction is free to cut closer to the bone? ... As always with Lacey, the writing can sound solemn ... Vivid particulars...give way to grandstanding riffs ... Yet the material is incendiary enough to survive its mannered telling – maybe it says more about me than about the book, but the truth is that I found myself consuming both parts as avidly as I would the ugliest gossip. Ultimately, the cathartic indictment of The Möbius Book is what gives it special voltage as an aesthetic experiment. It feels brave, even dangerous: a project born of damage, capable of damaging in turn the one person you suspect will read it most closely.
A category-defying, creative, thought-provoking piece of literature on loss, betrayal, friendships, faith, and more ... A sui generis work, like no other.
Ambitious ... Lacey’s writing is at its most vital in the fiction section; the memoir skews trite ... Still, her vulnerable search for answers and insertion of rhyming resonances across the two narratives excite. The author’s fans will be glad they took the plunge.
