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
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
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
French and Québécois online reviews, part four
“The succession of tests unwinds with clinical frigidity, which contrasts with their content and gives the impression of participating in a game, the stakes of which, however, surpass the dimension of simple play… La Maison des Épreuves is in reality a cry of love and despair, that extracts a sickly beauty from childhood anguishes in order to attempt to exorcise them, a guide for navigation between life and death, a set of directions for tolerating the pain of existence.”
— Ingannmic, “La maison des epreuves — Jason Hrivnak”
MCR: “A book that blew your mind?”
DC: “La Maison des Épreuves by Jason Hrivnak. A nightmarish book recently published by Éditions de l’Ogre, a cross between a survival manual and a kind of search for redemption. It’s the “literary UFO” of the current publishing season.”
— David Cantin, interviewed by Marie-Claude Rioux
“I didn’t expect to find such content and it’s a delight! We have the possibility of participating in the novel, what happiness. I’m astonished to have found what I was able to read into it. The same reflections and choices are waiting for you.”
— Laétitia, “La maison des épreuves”
“Jason Hrivnak’s book, La Maison des Épreuves, is one of those collections of stories that open a door hidden in the shadow of our imagination. The door that we avoid, on pain of feeling the heart beat too fast… Book of sorrow and consolation, La Maison des Épreuves, as its name indicates, is meant to test, to show, and to illuminate at the same time that it plunges us into the abyss.”
— “La Maison des Epreuves – Jason Hrivnak”
French and Québécois online reviews, part three
“It’s therefore a novel about the saving power of the imagination… an imagination that constitutes an abyss into which you must throw yourself in order to survive… Every paragraph is like the pitch for a tale that Kafka or Burroughs could have written, a dream forever mutating into nightmare.”
— Pierre, “Dans le style du napalm”
“La maison des épreuves is a book that obliges readers to leave their passivity, a sometimes disturbing book with a complicated construction. That being said, Jason Hrivnak’s first novel has something obsessive about it… One musn’t just read La maison des épreuves, one must take total possession of it.
— Anaïs Orieul, “10 livres à lire absolument en attendant le printemps”
“We’re plunged without cease into situations that are unsound, discomfiting, designed, we understand in the end, to put a name to pain, to put a name to that which should not be… Expect to have plenty of dreams at night in which Hrivnak’s words rock you to sleep…”
— Elizabeth Lord, “La Maison des épreuves de Jason Hrivnak: un beau cauchemar”
“La maison des épreuves is a book of the dead for the use of the living, the gaze of Orpheus toward a suicidal Eurydice… A masterpiece of literary game-craft.”
— Lucien Raphmaj, “Et Fiona avec vous au labyrinthe descendue…”