Billings' list

 " Exacting as Lentz’s literalism can be, it is also fresh and suggestive. After all, there are plenty of novels that embrace writerly self-consciousness—there are even several that do so by showing a prisoner trying to talk his way out of a prison (Claudio Magris’s 2006 novel Blindly and Elias Khoury’s Yalo, from 2004, are two recent examples that feel like spiritual cousins to Schattenfroh). In each of these books, the unreliability of the narrator’s monologizing can feel unsettling, but it ultimately serves to reinforce a larger settledness about the world outside the book. It suggests that there is a difference between such hyper-articulate (and, in Magris and Khoury’s cases, traumatized) narrators and us, the readers, who have somehow, despite being creatures of language ourselves, managed to hover above its dangers like Romans in a gladiatorial arena. They, the characters, are trapped by language. We, on the other hand, know where the world ends and writing begins—which means that, at the end of the day, we are safe, or at least certain enough about the potential pitfalls of language to stay away from them. "