No staid work of history, this. Sachs draws from the madcap, darkly comic tradition of postmodern European fiction to reimagine the continent’s catastrophic destiny ... Sachs is a very funny writer unafraid of italics and exclamation marks, which he marshals against the absurdity of the world.
Sachs... is a clever, self-aware storyteller, and he draws creative tension from his ostensibly childlike narrative form ... The Organs of Sense was a dense book, full of incident, yet always cohesive; at times, Gretel struggles to maintain a similar feeling, following unnecessary paths that can weaken individual stories ... But perhaps this is the point. Where his previous novel expanded our sense of history, Gretel collapses it.
A treasury of connected tales ... More than an experimentalist or even a satirist, Mr. Sachs is a dedicated comic writer ... The intricate absurdity of the stories is an end in itself.
An ingeniously woven novel that offers a stylized portrait of interwar Vienna, a fanciful account of Gretel and her family, a reflection on storytelling and on sanity, and—in the end—a sense of how vertiginous and alienated and threatened it felt to be Jewish in central Europe in the years just before Nazism. Playful, charming, and brilliant—a profundity made of toylike whimsies.
