Expansive ... Menasse’s brilliance is to evoke the sense of interrelatedness while subtly and relentlessly refusing to plug the gaps ... Menasse pulls off the trick of making us experience the scrappy, gappy nature of history ... Though a master of detail...the author is also adept at writing incompleteness. ... n epic achievement that ought to take its place as an essential text of European literature, devastating in its portrayal of how atrocities are perpetuated and disavowed.
Eva Menasse’s spellbinding writing draws us into the heads of the Darkenbloomers and into the heart of village life ... Like a good thriller, the seemingly innocuous clues are drip-fed to the reader through her wonderfully rounded characters who are faced with the revelation of the truth when journalists arrive in the village ... Astute characterizations ... A gripping investigation of guilt, collective memory, and revelation, and each of Eva Menasse’s carefully crafted sentences, in Charlotte Collin’s sensitive translation, is worth dwelling upon, for they stay with you, long after you have finished the book.
Rich, omniscient knowledge of the characters, whose quirky humor and humanity amid an impeccable backdrop of clandestine forests and 'undulating, dappled' mountain views captivate ... Heralding the expansive disruptions of social change, the intricate novel Darkenbloom muses through an Austrian town’s troubled past.
Stranger than [the setup] suggests ... The strangeness begins with that Godlike narrator, who...has attitude ... Patiently, sardonically, Menasse shifts between present and past, teasing out the long, obscured threads of her characters’ lives from her vast tapestry ... Menasse hews to the broad historical frame, but her novel justifies itself, as novels must, by doing what only fiction can. One could argue that Darkenbloom is too prosecutorial, and that none of Menasse’s characters especially surprise the reader. Greed, avarice, racism, and plain human weakness crop up right where you’d expect, in predictable doses ... But it is Menasse’s style—which is to say, the way she uses her narrator—that makes the case for her deep and original reimagining of history ... Teasing, searching, playful, scathing.
Menasse is, above all else, an astute observer of human psychology ... Menasse can be stringent towards her characters, but never inhumane or incurious. Each one is complicated and real ... In Menasse’s thoughtful hands, the invented town of Darkenbloom is not a cipher for one specific historical event, but rather a stage to explore more universal concerns ... A slow-burning thriller.
A big, sprawling book intent on confronting a nation with a history that it is still often unwilling to talk about openly. But it is also a frustratingly diffuse novel, the ambition of which isn’t always matched by the writing. This is not a problem of translation: Charlotte Collins’s rendering always feels precise and inventive ... The wilful opacity of the novel at the level of the sentence is made more frustrating by the fact that the narrator, who pops up now and then to set a scene or intervene more directly in the story, clearly knows much more about what’s going on in Darkenbloom than they ever let on.
An immersive, gloom-ridden tale ... The prose is overwrought...but Menasse impresses with her portrayal of the townspeople’s guilt and lingering prejudices ... This unsettling novel offers a singular sense of place.
