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.
