The French edition of Mutilation Song has been included in the Prix Sade’s first selection of twelve works. The Prix Sade aims to celebrate “contemporary libertinism”, to recognize a writer who has managed “beyond the vicissitudes of the Revolution and the influence of the moral order, to undo the shackles of literature like those of politics.” The prize will be awarded on the 14th of September.
Review of French edition in Les Imposteurs
“Demon’s blues, false bildungsroman, demonic epic, story of a downfall… the paths of interpretation are multiple.
Mutilation Song, magnificently translated by Claro, is a powerful novel, as fascinating as it is disturbing.”
— Guillaume Richez
Japanese article by Motoyuki Shibata
Prominent translator and scholar Motoyuki Shibata has published an article discussing Mutilation Song in the Japanese web-journal Kangaeru Hito (“Thinker”). The article examines the book alongside The Organs of Sense, by Adam Ehrlich Sachs, both novels having been recommended by American writer Brian Evenson.
Review in Belgian culture magazine Focus Vif
“A disturbing, delirious, suffocating assault—upon the family, the illusion of a protective hearth, the supposed solidarity of human beings—that one would, however, have to be wrongheaded not to admire the mastery and power.”
— François Perrin
French edition reviewed in webzine Diacritik
“The evil here does not reside in the tortures and abuses that Dinn, the demon, sends in visions to his anti-Saint-Antoine… but in the disaffection that he arranges, in the rupture of all personal ties. On closer observation, Mutilation Song, like The Plight House before it, is, strangely, a book about love.”
— Lucien Raphmaj
Review of French edition in webzine Un Dernier Livre
“Beyond the vertigo of contemplating a gem of pure cruelty, Jason Hrivnak is a writer without equal. A striking style, of the meticulously-crafted word… And all superbly translated by Claro, translator of the impossible, who renders into French this subtle language full of traps.
A tremendous book, to read with caution.”
— Paco Vallat
French radio review of Mutilation Song
“The almost clinical language in which these hallucinatory states are described… at the same time holds a subterranean current… the idea that there is, despite all, a space of purity, or in any case incorruptibility, of the human soul. It’s this delicate seed that the demon aims to suppress, to annihilate, to reduce utterly to ashes. And that, yet, is omnipresent.”
— Nikola Delescluse
Mutilation Song reviewed in L’Humanité
“Dinn’s powers are immense, and when he enumerates them in the ear of Thomas, his ‘apprentice demon’, the most blasé of readers cannot repress a shiver… Jason Hrivnak, who, with The Plight House, made a masterful entry into the literature of malaise, now gives us this new Song added to hell, this poetical call to damnation.”
— Alain Nicolas
First online reviews for French edition of Mutilation Song
“A new trap, this is what Jason Hrivnak proposes in Mutilation Song… A fabulous nightmare of hypnotic logorrhea, strewn with visions worthy of a Clive Barker on acid.”
— Nicolas Winter
“Dazzling and suffocating, this violent plunge into the demonism of schizophrenia opens an entire world-in-a-book, a labyrinth of shifting voices, of truths to be deciphered… A truly great novel.”
“Profoundly disturbing and resolutely magnificent.”
— Hugues Robert
French translation: Le chant de la mutilation
Le chant de la mutilation, the French translation of Mutilation Song, is now available in paperback and ebook formats from Éditions de l’Ogre, Paris-based specialists in the “literature of unreality”. The translation is by Claro.
“There was once the bildungsroman, the novel of formation, as illustrated by Dickens, Fielding, but also Flaubert, and Vallès, to cite only the most foundational and innovative. Would Jason Hrivnak invent another genre: the novel of deformation? This is what we are invited to discover… with the publication of Mutilation Song.”
— Claro
