RaveThe Scotsman (UK)Keenan is the kind of writer who can look forward to being lovingly over-interpreted into perpetuity, but one relatively simple angle on his work is that it flips the order of cultural authority – it presents the art and artistic personae generated by ordinary people as sacred phenomena, which might be beyond beyond the simple reckoning of elites, although they can be encouraged to understand ... According to this framing device, what we are reading when we read Xstabeth is a lost novel ... This is such a delicious idea, you’d think it would dominate this whole short, punchy book. It’s a mark of Keenan’s engaging contrariness, however, that his high concept is but one of many matters competing for his narrator’s attention ... Keenan’s marriage of the sordid to the sublime and the erudite to the bluntly instinctual is a phenomenon to be treasured.
Javier Marias
PositiveThe Scotsman (UK)This cerebral, coolly compelling crime novel appears in the first instance to have one of those observant but passive narrators recognisable from works such as The Great Gatsby, Brideshead Revisited and The Secret History: a bystander who reports on the main action without doing a great deal to alter its course. As it turns out Maria, our guiding voice here, gets a little closer to the flame than the reader is initially given to expect – and responds in a rather more complex way ... Much of what occurs in Marías’ novel is powered by the supposed passion stirred by one character for another, and this primacy of emotion does not languish unanalysed: over screeds of conversation and conjecture, these characters assess love and what it might drive them to do ... This is a mature, thoughtful take on potboilerish content: a crime thriller seen through a philosophical and literary filter, which, while it dwells little on the gory details of its central misdeeds, can find copious pages on which to synopsise and muse on slightly relevant texts by Balzac and Dumas ... Smart, thoughtful, morally challenging and consistently surprising in its tense twists, this is a sleek atmospheric work – one that gives the lie to its persistent contention that fiction and \'the idiotic world of publishing\' have nothing much to tell us about our lives.
