PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)In Martin Aitken’s translation, the prose is fluent and nimble, the imagery possessed of a steely melancholia ... [The older tale] is the novel’s essence – a realist affair laced with the faintest suggestions of myth, the occult and the perverse operations of fate.
PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Washington writes in a realist mode, with an acute attention to the look and feel of a street, a shop window, a meal. His prose is taut and rhythmic, and he excels at capturing both the minute particulars of a given bar or apartment or district, and the numbing vastness of the city. All the same, his decision not to assign names to his principal characters, while initially lending the novel an air of universality, lapses into what feels like a formula for its own sake ... Palaver often feels insistently unmomentous, its exchanges and episodes like so many missed beats ... Yet, like the laying of a mosaic, the fragments slowly delineate a larger picture. The stasis of the story’s first half begins, at last, to shift ... Palaver, in the end, is the story of two people being re-revealed – both to each other and to themselves.
PositiveThe Spectator (UK)Extravagant, relentless ... Dubno has a particular talent for capturing the vanity, neediness and delusion of a certain type of wealthy ‘benefactor’ ... The novel is at its best where its claim to dramatic realism is thinnest ... If at times the narrative style has the stridency and one-sidedness of a rant, it also possesses an enlivening, claustrophobic charge ... The repetitiveness becomes a propulsive refrain, like a delirious anger that feeds off its own momentum.
K Patrick
PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)\" [a] subtle, scintillating novel ... This is a story in which clichés -- of genre, of identity -- disintegrate under pressure ... From the first page Patrick’s prose has a lapidary quality. Phrases fall like beats ... Indeed, the intimacy and suppleness of Patrick’s writing mark it out from the stripped-clean default of much contemporary fiction ... The sex scenes are masterly in their combination of detail and omission ... Lacking firm anchorage in time or place, the story turns on the tension (or inextricable dynamic) between personae and inner selves.\
Tom Crewe
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Atmospheric ... As much as for its story, The New Life is compelling for its stylistic flair. Crewe’s taut prose is shot through with descriptive vividness ... Occasionally the measured quality of the writing induces the desire for some kind of rupture, a break (however transient) into a different register, though that impulse is of a piece with the psychological realism: we inhabit the characters’ striving after some other state of being.
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... over 700 lucid and engrossing pages, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan retrace and distil this myth, adding facets to a figure whose celebrity became, in his lifetime, a carapace and remained as a death mask ... Much of what follows, as we enter the main act of Bacon’s life, is familiar...yet the authors give the tale a fresh momentum, a feeling of life as it happened, rather than the chiaroscuro Life that became the foundation of Bacon’s persona and the mirror image of his art. ... The women closest to Bacon emerge particularly clearly ... Bacon’s intelligence, charm, acerbity, nihilism and restlessness resonate throughout these pages ... Much of the book’s power is in inducing us to see again, from a new angle, what has previously appeared familiar ... numerous other paintings receive eloquent analyses ... not an art historian’s encomium, however, any more than it is a hagiography. The authors are candid about the second-rate quality of some of Bacon’s work, particularly in later years when he ceased to edit his output so voraciously ... One of the many marvels of Revelations is just how present and immediate Bacon is made to seem (in contrast to William Feaver’s monumental biography of Freud, in which the subject grows ever more remote and repellent). Even as he ebbs away, we see and hear him vividly ... What Revelations leaves us with powerfully is Bacon’s mercurial, electric character and a palpable sense of his body: his fluid gait, his \'flutey\' voice, and a face ever more asymmetrical as time progressed.
