“I read this novel as a quite caustic study of loneliness and abandonment, but there is also a kind of helplessness and total lack of commitment here, that feels frightening. Oliver floats around, mediated by a voice that is incapable of putting words to his own situation. He seeks out people everywhere, contacts them, but still seems strangely uninterested in them on a deeper level … In this sense, Anne Oterholm seemingly sticks strictly to the minimalistic literary universe where plot and action is only a thin veneer. In this autumn’s novel, Liar, she still manages to draw an almost frightening portrait of a young person unmoored in his own emotional life”
Dagsavisen
“Liar is a parasitic novel which draws nourishment off the reader. On purpose … With the title Liar, we obviously can’t take what Oliver tells us at face value. Yes, he occasionally comes across as a modern, hollowed-out Peer Gynt, where lies and damned fiction are two sides of the same coin. He has an effect on other people, but the people around him do not have an effect on him. The reader’s unease doesn’t just stem from the way he thinks about and acts towards other people. It is also connected to my empathy with and decoding of Oliver as a psychological character; that I read him as a stunted, emotionless young man … In Liar, Anne Oterholm explores how much the reader works to create meaning and motivation to continue reading”
Vårt Land