PositiveFinancial Times (UK)There is little unconventional about this boy’s own story—though sticking to the Bildungsroman template does lend a tragic inevitability ... there may be no surprise but that doesn’t mean it’s not shocking ... The book offers a crudely symbolic bestiary of writhing cod, heaving live bait, gassed moles and, most grotesquely, severed chicken heads that continue posthumously to peck. More subtle is the economy with which the author conjures the toxic family atmosphere, a beautiful example of writing between the lines that conveys Arvid’s limited perspective. There is pleasure, too, in watching Petterson shift through the gears from pleasure to unease in one of those gloriously sinuous sentences that have become something of a trademark ... it is a far more interesting book when read beside the Norwegian’s other novels ... Few novelists rework details so obsessively from book to book ... To this land of echoes, Echoland is a fascinating addition.
Alexander Maksik
PositiveThe Financial Times (UK)The arrangement of these multiple viewpoints is revealing without being formulaic, while the prose is cool, direct and empathetic. If the book has a weakness, it’s that it shows off its philosophical and literary touchstones too obviously, notably in the repeated references to Hamlet and Camus. But as a study of idealism and fallibility it succeeds brilliantly.
Rawi Hage
PositiveThe Financial TimesDe Niro's Game is the most subtly nuanced, psychologically compelling book about the corrosive effects of war to have been written for a long time … Hage's writing, rather like Beirut, is richly informed by Arabic and French culture and is anachronistically grand in places. Passages of apocalyptic passion and dream-like digressions intermittently punctuate its taut, deadpan prose … The descriptions of the city are so skilful you can taste the dust in the air. Yet De Niro's Game never trades on Middle- Eastern exoticism for its own sake. Each detail adds to a portrait of a desensitised society on the brink of anarchy.
Aravind Adiga
RaveThe Financial TimesAdiga’s portrait of the Indian capital is very funny but unmistakably angry. From his master’s Honda, an increasingly unhinged Balram observes a city riven with status anxiety, where every sparkling new mall hides in its hinterland a flea-bitten market for service staff; every bottle of Johnnie Walker has a bootleg counterpart. Above all, it’s a vision of a society of people complicit in their own servitude: to paraphrase Balram, they are roosters guarding the coop, aware they’re for the chop, yet unwilling to escape … Balram’s violent bid for freedom is shocking. What, we’re left to ask, does it make him – just another thug in India’s urban jungle or a revolutionary and idealist? It’s a sign of this book’s quality, as well as of its moral seriousness, that it keeps you guessing to the final page and beyond.
Anne Tyler
MixedThe Financial TimesFrom this scenario, Tyler draws gentle humour with mixed results...But even confirmed Tyler fans (and I count myself among them) may find it hard to love Pyotr as much as the book clearly would like us to. The funny foreigner act seems oddly retrograde ... This provocative sally into the gender wars, at least, is in the spirit of Shakespeare’s source material. But for the most part, Tyler’s amiable retelling could do with a dash more vinegar to accompany all those pinches of salt that we are required to take.
