SF SIte Review...

In which Jakob Schmidt gets right to the heart of the book:

It may seem self-contradictory to claim that Vellum is stripped down and that it is repetitive at the same time. Wouldn't the former feature imply that the story is narrated with as little words as necessary? That's only true if you assume that a story can be reduced to this kind of core. Actually, this assumption is a central concept of the novel -- metaphorically, it appears as the concept of the "one language," in which signified and signifier collapse into each other, and the "ultimate story," the fate into which the characters are bound. But the style of Vellum not only captures this idea mimetically in its often onomatopoetic language, it also opposes it: repetition illustrates the constant failure of getting to the core, the constitutive lack of language. It makes us feel that each sentence slightly misses the mark, that is must be slightly altered -- again and again. This is not a mark of failure but of the possibility of change in face of the totalitarian force of story.