Spooky and sublime.

Gander’s novel surges. No other writer that I know of has so accurately and carefully depicted the tiny internecine battles of two lovers on an interminable drive as does Gander in this book.

The Trace is a poet’s book, which is to say it is filled with the pleasures of language, sharply and skillfully used, but Forrest Gander also has the narrative drive of the best novelists. The Trace is a tense, propulsive thriller, which keeps on building until the very last page.

Gander’s poetic writing lends this story a dense, brooding atmosphere; a carefully crafted novel of intimacy and isolation.

As in his previous works, Gander shows he is keenly aware of the loneliness that imbues human suffering and sets grief alight using beautiful, tense, haunting prose.

What really haunts Gander, who is a translator as well as a poet, isn’t so much death as the complexities of life: the frequently unknown stories that lie beneath and within the stories we tell.

His work burrows into the particularities of disparate places and cultures in order to sound the differences between them.

A restlessly experimental writer.

A moving elegy. It is also proof that language has magical potential.

The clarity of his artistic vision, formal innovation, and emotional honesty are enviable.

In this strange and beautiful novel as in life, love is part of what is sacred.