RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewUnforgettable ... She can deliver top-line disgust, the existentialist’s moldy bread and butter, showing how life curdles when it seems to lack any sane form ... With Gallant at the wheel, telling jokes over her shoulder, I enjoy being aesthetically carsick. The exhaust fuming off her pages, reeking of life’s absurdities and pathos, is invigorating. She blurs her reader’s sight, but in that blur are images of real, moving people.
John Banville
PositiveThe Financial TimesBanville often gives his narrators an anguished sensitivity to the sublime, while also making them aware of their own sordid compulsions and ruthlessness. In his new memoir he drafts a self-portrait in the general likeness of these hard-hearted, heartbroken anti-heroes ... Banville is an expert in melancholy urban phenomena: the pleasures of dilapidation and overgrown parklands, the long-gone, gaudy shops of one’s past that blaze in the memory ... beautifully true and vaguely obscene, with people and place and weather positioned in artful, erotic balance.
