Its great to see the reviews coming in for Grigory Kanovich’s novel Devilspel. Becky Long in the Irish Times wrote that the novel was ‘powerful, demanding and at times transcendent’.
‘In the context of Kanovich’s wider works, Devilspel evokes and memorialises a community and a world that no longer exists. Powerful, demanding and at times transcendent, the novel asks the reader to not only engage with the concept and experience of suffering, but to embrace it, and the human spirit’s capacity to overcome it.’
Elsewhere, Max Easterman wrote for the European Literature Network, that Devilspel ‘is a chilling and devastating reminder of the destruction Nazi Germany wrought on the Litvaks,… Kanovich’s unfussy, matter-of-fact prose, interspersed with passages of great lyricism – all beautifully translated by Yisrael Cohen – only heightens the sense of fear and foreboding that fills the pages of this masterpiece.’
‘Devilspel is horror with a light touch’, Daniel Snowman write in The Jewish Chronicle, while Dr Paul Socken wrote in the Jewish Telegraph, ‘Shtetl Love Song and Devilspel will no doubt constitute an important part of the literary canon of eastern European and world literature and stand as a lasting legacy that readers everywhere will reflect on for generations.’
Bloggers have been praising the book too.
Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone felt, ‘there is a sense in which Devilspel feels very traditional in its telling – multiple characters with a narrator whose third person moves between them with ease; a kind of benign distance in the unfolding of tragedy – but there is a beauty in this delivery, an echo of stories already told, portents unheeded that need to be reiterated and strengthened so that we hear them clearly and hopefully don’t repeat them. ‘