MixedThe New York TimesDybek doesn’t use [flashbacks] sparingly... as a result, The Verdun Affair overheats and explodes ... This is a story of operatic complexity, narrated in many voices, rich in imagery, but sometimes poor in discipline ... [the novel\'s] strained images are accompanied by a certain portentousness of tone.
Mark Helprin
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIf these are clichés — what’s more threadbare than May and December, student and amorous teacher? — Helprin revitalizes them with the energy of his language. A rhetorician might slice his prose style into scraps of Greek — asyndeton here, hypotaxis there — but that would fail to account for the intensely lyrical voice that both heightens and deepens every sentence, at times attaining a kind of Joycean beauty ... This is not to say the novel is without flaws. The plot moves andante. Maddening coincidences will elicit a groan. Characters confuse conversation with autobiography. Jules’s self-absorption leads to occasional passages of wearying profundity, when the golden sentences begin to fray ... But Helprin’s generosity of language and emotion allows room for missteps as well as brilliance. His Paris does exist in the present tense, irresistibly, undeniably real and alive, as though summoned by its creator rather than imagined.
