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'The central motive-theme of Suzana Tratnik's expressive and extraordinarily intensive short stories is love. It is love in its homoerotic form, which is still considerably rare and peculiar in Slovenian literary space, in spite of its thematic plurality. And what is the revelation of love in Tratnik's short prose like? The moment of its wording is usually a kind of farewell from the beloved one. Farewell as a moment when the joined, integrated world cracks apart and exposes its formerly blurred edges that have now become extremely sharpened. Love and hate, the force of life and closeness of death conflate at these edges. There is no place for elegant withdrawal or compromise or, as the Slovenian poet Svetlana Makarovic says: "What has been knotted, cannot be unknotted, what has been crumpled, can never be flattened." Therefore blood flows along with tears and there is also a corpse, sometimes the narrator's and sometimes her lover's. It seems as though only the act of destruction - and the act of taking possession in its core - can restore fragile certainty in a ragged and transitory world. This "reconstructed" certainty draws its legitimacy from the authenticity of the subject's markedly self-determined position in a world that functions in accordance with dictator-minded, compulsive and alienated norms and sanctions.'

- from The Radio Slovenija broadcast The Early Writings, May 1996

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'One could say that Suzana Tratnik's short stories fall into the category of "women's writing" but this is not explicitly so and not a priori. It is all about "universal writing" and its diapason of meanings is broad and various. Tratnik reflects upon reminiscences of her childhood, or upon her girlfriends and the melancholic gaps between them, and she interlaces surrealist elements that manifold her prose ... In the story Playing Games with Greta Tratnik uses morbid aesthetics in order to play around with human evil that must have been embodied already in the womb, and she takes a trip against compromising, being the only device to gain the attention of "bad" or "good" people. The pleasing experience of this prose is that the author, in spite of her noticable and outstanding women's writing does not sentimentalize, because she knows what she wants and in most cases, also gets it ... In shorter meditative stories the author is being absorbed in a world of fantasy, which she shares with her lover (the Flight story). There, she also indicates other sides of love relationships, and proves that not everything is merely a quick fuck or an orgasm, and that is what makes this creative force solid and gives it its human ripeness.'

- from a recension in the cultural periodical Razgledi (The Views), Ljubljana, November 1998

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