For readers who first met Harpman via her melancholic digital afterlife, We Were Forbidden will arrive as a revelation. The gem of the collection is its longest story, 'The Broom Closet,' a sex farce that wrangles its author’s ideas about artistic permanence into a more prosaic form ... Arch, light-fingered, and very funny.
Harpman, the author of over fifteen works of fiction, deserves to be virally rediscovered. Transit Books has now collected three newly translated novellas ... They read like preparatory sketches ... They also expand Harpman’s range, showcasing a capacity for lightness, even humor ... In Harpman’s desperate, ornery, and alien universes, her avatars write their memoirs for no one at all. It is a desolate prospect, but also a triumph. If only she could see them now.
Across these works, Harpman traces variations of the same psychic drama. Her dystopias diagnose the mind under pressure: how it defends, divides, and turns against itself ... Having lived through displacement, illness, and the violence of institutions, Harpman understands how quickly prohibitions take root. The world may collapse, but the mind continues to enforce its codes.
The three female protagonists in this sharp-edged triptych from international bestseller Harpman (I Who Have Never Known Men) push back against the political, educational, and sexual regimes, respectively, that govern their lives ... On their own, the entries feel somewhat slight, but together they accrue power in their depictions of conflicts between obedience and reason, and between submission and desire. This is transfixing.
The three stories that constitute Harpman’s latest collection to be translated into English (again by Schwartz, who quietly dazzles) further testify to the writer’s nuanced brilliance ... Renewed interest in Harpman’s oeuvre isn’t just warranted: In works like this, she reveals herself to be one of the major writers of the 20th century, comparable to Gogol and Kafka but with a style and outlook entirely her own ... Another stunning missive from Harpman’s repertoire.
