At Mixer, Rebekah Hall reviews Claire Donato’s Burial, calling it “a brave novel…. a raw and honest evocation of the personal experience and overwhelming power of grief”:
Writes Hall:
While the theme of grief is familiar, the way in which Donato approaches it is decidedly expressionist. She evokes the intense personal meaning of grief by uprooting it from its “objective” context and projecting its subjective essence onto an outer landscape, destabilizing the effect produced by the artificial objectivity of an overall realist framework. Sorrow is a necklace choking the woman who wears it; a gumball is a human head rolling across the carpet of a hotel. Occasionally, Donato’s imagery gestures toward a faux realism, at times oscillating toward what many readers would interpret as psychological realism, and yet the expressionist context retains the uniquely personal experience of grief.