"Reading this with my parents is one of my earliest memories. I remember being fascinated by the naked body of a boy covered in dough. Probably the first penis I ever saw. I remember he makes a plane out of dough to get milk, and the best line by far is when he falls in, “I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me.”"

"I can’t help but include this book on any list I’d ever make of books I love. It is bewitching, playful, poetic, and really beautiful. Ingrid Caven looks like Marlene Dietrich and sings like Lotte Lenya. She was Fassbinder’s muse on film and Schuhl’s in life, and the book creates a fictive plane of reality in between all four, plus postwar German history, plus the 1970s."

"The first novel I read that held together on a regular plane as well as thematic one - as story as well as a symbolic journey. There could be others that work like Jude, but something about this book - the way the author is dealing with ideas like evolution along with the collapse of class culture - made it feel like a precursor to modernism. Like the birth of modernism."