... startling and beautiful ... Youthful angst is well-worn territory, of course, but nothing about Last Night in Nuuk is trite or overfamiliar. Each character is drawn carefully and with compassion, but Korneliussen refuses to make any of them either flawless angels or irredeemable jerks. They're all painfully human, fumbling through their youth and sexualities, all in vastly different ways. And crucially, they all have voices of their own ... Korneliussen... knocks it out of the park. Last Night in Nuuk is a stunning book, at once audacious and honest, sorrowful and triumphant, and Korneliussen seems certain to have a remarkable career ahead of her.
A novel that gripped me from the very first page with its intensity, freshness, and humor. The novel is short, only around two hundred pages, but it moves like a bullet: powerful, emotionally dense, and over much more quickly than I wanted it to be ... There’s an earnestness to Last Night in Nuuk that would be cheesy in another book; wrapped in Korneliussen’s prose, however, it works ... Together, these five voices form a story of tenderness and courage that comes despite the hedonism of their youth, or maybe because of it ... Even in the darkest times of one’s life, when friends humiliate us, when our lovers cheat, and when we feel most alone, Last Night in Nuuk tells us to remain optimistic
The characters are all handled tenderly and with obvious care, and each stream of consciousness narrative can stand alone but fit neatly into this larger work ... For a book so focused on character, it is somewhat disappointing that the protagonists’ voices can blur together at times, with Inuk’s being the exception. Thankfully, the propulsive nature of each individual’s narrative—urgent, tense, and full of intentional rough edges that allow emotions to shine through—largely compensates for this. With Last Night in Nuuk, Korneliussen has crafted a convincing, nuanced depiction of what it feels like to be young and out of control while allowing us to inhabit a world that has been infrequently, if ever, presented to American readers.
Nuuk [successfully offers a glimpse into life in Greenland], yet aside from the lure of its provenance and a handful of charms it isn’t a very good novel ... The thin story amounts to nothing more gripping than early adulthood drama sparked by infidelity, the struggle with sexual identity, and ill-advised love affairs. The characters that wrestle with their behaviors are more interesting than those that don’t ... the characters’ voices are hardly differentiated, so the sections don’t feel discrete ... The book resembles television in its quick scene changes, its multi-camera approach, its low-stakes conflicts, its shallow epiphanies ... Last Night in Nuuk is not up to the task of fully delineating the Greenlandic character, of telling American audiences all they need to know about living in Nuuk. Not even for one night. Less a novel than a clutch of loose stories, it reads like a long project by an undergraduate with lots to say and even more to learn.
[The book's] story is at once familiar—with its trials of young love, late-night parties, urban exploits of twentysomethings, and betrayals of close friends—and unfamiliar—glimpsing the lives of urban Greenlandic Inuit that most readers outside the Danophone world know nothing about. Moreover, in its English translation, Last Night in Nuuk is an excellent example of contemporary literary fiction ... The reader looking for the magical realist writing that blends Western and indigenous cosmologies, and which has become a generic expectation of indigenous writing among non-indigenous readers, will instead find that Last Night in Nuuk is more like a Greenlandic version of the Friends sitcom (NBC) with lots of queer brown people ... If Last Night in Nuuk is representative of Korneliussen's writing oeuvre, it's not a stretch to say that she is an important literary voice of our generation.
The novel was written in haste ... The result is a nervously energetic plot that pulls you along with all the excitability and inattention to detail of youth ... Not all writers, even with extra attention to structure and characterization, can convey pure pain the way Korneliussen does, nor is it common to find a young writer capable of employing the honesty required to show the complexities of youth. In her haste to break free of the preset confines of post-colonialism, she does stumble. But where she succeeds, she soars high, inviting us into a world of blurred lines where neat resolutions are probably just new and complicated beginnings. This debut book shines with hope for the youth and literature of Greenland and for the writer herself who, like her characters, is still finding her way.
Would such praise have been the outcome were it not for her age (28), the scarcity of Greenlandic fiction, and Last Night in Nuuk fresh subject matter? ... Huge life changes happen in the course of a paragraph ... would be better off targeted at young adults: teens need literature that reflects their rites of passage, especially those of minorities.
All of the rich identity crises are set against the biting culture of the characters’ Greenland, a conservative, bottle-up-your-feelings kind of place. Sharp, witty, and cathartic, like releasing a long-held breath.
Captivating ... Told in bouncy, colloquial prose...honestly explores sexuality and gender identity, and the ways in which they can cause distance and connection with others ... The deeper issues beneath these stories bring about revelations both touching and heartbreaking. What’s so unexpected and lovely is the narrative’s irrepressible optimism and earnestness. Translated seamlessly into idiomatic English, Korneliussen’s wonderful novel introduces readers to a notable new voice in world literature.
Heartbreaking ... Sound like a soap opera? It is. But it is also more than this. Tender, evocative, and pithy, this debut novel creates a vivid picture of people struggling for authenticity and voice. At the same time, loose ends prevail, perhaps a reflection of the characters' own lack of resolution but frustrating nonetheless since it’s impossible to predict whether they’ll succumb to despair or find fulfillment ... A powerfully drawn but ultimately disappointing look at the ongoing obstacles facing LGBTQ youth as they come of age.
