History. A Mess. (2016)
2016
166 pages
Fiction
While studying a seventeenth-century diary, the protagonist of History. A Mess. thinks she’s discovered ground-breaking evidence about the identity of one of Britain’s first professional female artists. This discovery will change her academic career, her whole life . . . until she realizes that her “discovery” amounted to two diary pages stuck together. But at this point there’s no going back, and she goes to great lengths to hide her mistake— almost at the cost of her sanity.
Reviews
“A complex and arresting novel where a super precise style and an ingenious construction come together.”
Nomination Committee for the Women’s Literature Prize
“Absolutely brilliant from beginning to end.”
Halla Oddny Magnusdottir, National TV
“As her state of mind becomes increasingly fraught, Lytton Smith’s adept translation skillfully conveys [the narrator’s] neurotic, internal experience, which often expresses possibilities, thoughts, speculation, and interpretations instead of an external reality.”
Callum McAllister, Asymptote Journal
“Like a cubist work of art.”
Johanna Maria Einarsdottir, DV
“An amazing story. . . . A very memorable reading experience, and in spite of a serious undertone there’s a very finely tuned quiet humor.”
Julia M. Alexandersdottir, Morgunbladid
“What I admire most about Pálsdóttir’s writing is her ability to hide a strictly structured course of events under a gliding, occasionally deliberately (but not distractingly) chaotic style; her ability to orchestrate the random; to construct a perspective for the narrator that, most of the time, reveals both everything and nothing about what is actually going on; and the way she covers real tensions and worries with a quilt of details, as they are so often covered in life.”
Rein Raud, European Literature Network
“History. A Mess. . . . is at once a disturbing but riveting portrait of a glassy psyche and an enlightening critique of the constraints and pressures of modern scholarship.”
Bailey Trela, Ploughshares
“Fans of the nouveau roman—Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, etc.—will be right at home here.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Pálsdóttir writes with the hand of a mystery author and the mind of a postmodernist, teasing out her protagonist’s problem while playing with literary forms, fragmenting timelines, and injecting fierce irony.”
Publishers Weekly
“Its ambition is met with resounding success every step of the way.”
Will Harris, Books and Bao
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