“Markus Midré has written a very fine book. The prose flows so quietly and richly, there is a kind of rustle in the text, a melancholy rustle, like the sound of the stylus against the vinyl records in the good old days, the sound between the tracks. Midré writes with open senses, he captures the kinds of details that makes the text believable, and he does so without insisting authority, but with a natural authenticity. He doesn’t have the common objectionable habit of listing fashionable coordinates, but the details fall into place where they belong.”
Dag og Tid

“Beautiful, gentle, well-written. Finely tuned about a musician’s fleeting life and career … The language gives this novel a force of its own, and it is a pleasure to read.”
Dagbladet

“Gripping about reaching one’s goal before one is there … in the elegant, artful and lyrically alert construction of fiction An Honest Face, he is very much alive … Midré also creates something that was not there before, in a text with elegant changes of perspective and a lot of dialogue: In a third-person narrative where the narrator knows his man’s innermost feelings, he keeps popping up as an “I” (“I thought that she thought that …”). Thus the narrator, the author himself, if you will, becomes both a storyteller, a mediator and interpreter, he investigates who he himself is while inventing a persona. It is executed brilliantly.”
 Stavanger Aftenblad 

“Midré captures the glow behind the meditative concentration and makes the passages buzz with energy … The language is effortlessly lyrical, and moves smoothly and in waves from the quiet atmospheric to the short, colourful climax: ‘And you could say that nothing disappears, it lingers in the world, but that’s not true, it is stowed together and shovelled out, it is stacked in containers, it erodes and rottens, it is torn up and crumbles, it is remelted, it runs into the ground like fine sand or clay, and eventually becomes part of the flora.’ Guitar solos, if you like … An elegant, tightly arranged book, that succeeds both as a post-modern mockumentary, a novel about the work of an artist’s creativity and a concentrated meditation on the perishability of all things.
Dagens Næringsliv

“Markus Midrés novel An Honest Face has an all-consuming intensity that still floats quietly along. This is what beautiful books are made of … The language is the momentum of this novel. It is beautiful, and it has its own a value. We know what will happen, yet it is not where the greatness of this novel exists. It is all in the choice of words, the depictions, images and contrasts. The paragraphs live a life on their own and create their own chronology and coherence. They make the images that are created even more magnificent.”
Vårt Land