As well as the fragmentary aspects of Běta’s interactions with others and herself, there are the journeys she makes through a highly-personalised Prague: not so much the city of visitors, tourists, and artists but the city inhabited by the ‘precariat’: the hard-pressed, the excluded, the homeless, the vulnerable, the mentally ill. Perhaps Kafka could also navigate this more-than background Prague in which the characters have to live, work, and have their being.

— John Howard, Wormwood

Bĕta’s story is that of an invisible woman, forgotten and abandoned, holding on to her only possession: memory, intertwined with surreal hallucinations. Through Běta, Zuzana Brabcová gives a voice not only to her but to all overlooked women who have been swallowed and forgotten in the dark and brutal transformation of society that followed the collapse of communism.

— Silvia Sovic, European Literature Network

With singular, controlled balance Brabcová had delivered one of the most unrelenting character portraits the critic had ever read. The narrator, Alzběta, who goes by Běta, is a destitute writer in modern-day Prague. In very short chapters she looks at her life and the world, confronting memory, poverty, imagination, entropy, exhaustion, substance abuse, loneliness, and artistry, the entire range of physical, emotional, quasi-spiritual experiences. It’s as if she’s found a way to leave her body, at age 54, and see her existence from all sides, with fearsome insight. Several times, she uses a tree as the key symbol of herself, sometimes walking, sometimes bloody and damaged.

— Matthew Jakubowski, Textshop Experiments

Composed like a twenty-first century flashback to Nikolai Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman,” Zuzana Brabcová’s excellent, final novel Aviaries is a surrealist collage of memories, anxieties, and fantasies.

— Jeff Alford, Rain Taxi

Aviaries is an unsettling, provocative novel that gets richer with each successive reading—and it demands and inspires multiple readings. Tereza Novická’s translation sparkles, moving fluidly across Brabcová’s intricate assemblage, and the novel’s haunting refrain seems perfect, a mantra for our age: “Something is happening. Something’s in the air. Something isn’t right.”

— Seth Rogoff, Rain Taxi

... a lesson in literary phantasmagoria – not for the faint of heart.

— Hiba Tahir, The Arkansas International

Aviaries is anchored in history, politics, satire, and humor. Stalin, Mozart, and even Proust lend height and sound to
its metaphors. In turn, the news of the day, of every day
in every place, lend the dose of reality against which all
minds must end their race to feel. But what is most important about this, the last of Brabcová’s gifts, what makes it deserving of a place in the most minimalist of bookshelves, is its honest, overwhelming beauty, its celebration of language, imagery,
and humanity, and its tribute to all of life, observed.

— Anjanette Delgado, New York Journal of Books

With its sharp sense of the absurd but also grounded in the all too-real contemporary world, Brabcová effectively presents a dark-hued picture of the present.

— M.A. Orthofer, The Complete Review

The brilliance is in the prose that captures both the everyday working of Beta's life but also the dream or nightmare way she envisions the world around her as surreal and hyper-real over time maybe even both at the same time.

— Winstondad's

A deeply moving work of social exclusion, it is akin to William Kennedy’s Ironweed on magic mushrooms, a melancholic work where we wonder if there is to be any redemption for the narrator as she slips further and further into decline.

— Messenger's Booker

A sophisticated testimony about social exclusion that oscillates between diary, dream entries, and phantasmagorical prose.

— Literární noviny

Aviaries has a multifarious form, with the author alternating between short accounts of real events and imaginative stories. There is here a precision of expression pregnant with meaning, in which the core of matters emerge: subtlety and sensibility. Exactly the type of quality virtually taboo today.

— MF Dnes

[Aviaries] puts us in a public sphere that has no use for those who are incompatible with the exigencies of the day, with the culture of youth, success, physical prowess. Brabcová is a superb stylist, and with this short book she has stepped beyond the wall of literary art that seldom allows for this type of social commentary and analysis.

— Respekt