Amerikanska kritiker hyllar Johannes Anyuru

Recensioner av svenska författare i amerikanska The New York Times är vi inte bortskämda med. Om man inte heter Johannes Anyuru som recenserats inte mindre än två gånger i tidningen – bara i år. Förutom den senaste romanen har tidningen även recenserat hans En storm kom från paradiset.

– Att en svensk författare under ett och samma år får två av sina romaner recenserade i ansedda New York Times är närmast unikt och visar vilken nivå Johannes Anyuru håller på den internationella litterära scenen, säger Linda Altrov Berg, Norstedt Agency.

”They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears has a powerful emotional core … Anyuru’s ability to imagine a thread connectic present-day exclusion to future atrocities makes this more than a genre entertainment”, skriver tidningens recensent Hari Kunzru om den amerikanska utgåvan av De kommer att drunkna i sina mödrars tårar (översatt av Saskia Vogel, utgiven av Two Lines Press). Hari Kunzru menar att Johannes Anyuru skrivit en roman om ett samtida Sverige där värderingar som satt oss på kartan internationellt tycks gått förlorade:

”He has written a ’state of the nation’ novel for a country that seems to be losing faith in the civic values for which it is internationally admired”.

Fler amerikanska kritiker är också imponerade av Johannes Anyurus roman:

It’s a rare author who has such sensitivity with explosive materials…I came away thinking of the book as an attempt to forge a more humane means of expression, one that could surmount all our fears and failures.
Washington Post (US)

…an ingeniously plotted work…Anyuru’s dystopia persuades because it is inextricable from the anxieties of his Muslim characters in contemporary Sweden, from disaffected youths who sell hash and flirt with radicalism to imams preaching forbearance in cramped basement mosques. The grammar of their faith, from its rituals of prayer to its reassurances of eternity, offers a means of orientation beyond precarious circumstances—as well as a counterpoint to the nativist equation of birthplace and belonging.
Harper’s Magazine (US)

In a novel that’s propulsive and compulsively readable in a multitude of ways, one of the most luscious elements is the lyrical union between Anyuru and his translator, Saskia Vogel … Anyuru has done something impressive and subversive with this novel: he has created a thriller for a new era of contemporary terror and radicalism, a book that reflects on what it means to live within the constructed abstraction of nationality and to suffer because of it, to have your life put in jeopardy based on popular fear and politics.
Los Angeles Review of Books (US)

[Anyuru]. . . turns a novel about terrorism, time travel and alternative realities into something even stranger than those things: a philosophical meditation on hope.
San Francisco Chronicle (US)

Anyuru underscores the reality that even parallel worlds involve global connections… Each of his characters feels real, whether experiencing friendship and delight or torture and death.
NPR (US)

They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears is, I assure you, one of the most phenomenal novels you’ll read in this or any year. Its politics are important, but Anyuru’s searing dissection of human beings is far more moving. Do not miss this book.
Book Riot (US)

It begins with an assault on a comic book store during an event by a cartoonist who has made jokes at the Prophet’s expense, but where it goes from there is strange, magical, and one of the first books to emerge out of our modern time to touch terrorism the way Vonnegut did war. Anyuru doesn’t shock the mind, but rather force us to ask new questions about what being a spectator truly means.
John Freeman, Lit Hub (US)

… a rare, powerful multiverse novel that reflects the best and worst of human potential.
Foreword Reviews, starred review (US)

In gorgeous prose, Anyuru’s potent story addresses today’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and the grim future it could create.
Publishers Weekly (US)