RaveThe Boston GlobeUnlike-any-novel-I’ve-read-before ... I have puzzled over how vividly it remains with me — I keep reentering this world, its sensory intensity more palpable than many memories of my own life. The novel’s ability to perpetuate itself seems to me to come both from the fantastic virtuosity of the writing and from the wonderfully realized idea of the book ... The clear story lines of fable — flight, romance, battle scene, epic journey, retrospect — are throughlines around which reverberate the propulsive and complicated sentences Hemon writes ... The World and All That It Holds makes one bold innovative move after another, rapidly changing perspectives, leaping forward with the flexibility of the splendid narrative voice, bringing in powerful characters ... The astonishment of this novel is that it creates that movement in time. In The World and All That It Holds, we do remember that future, and all the futures it entails.
Marilynne Robinson
RaveBookforumRobinson moves beautifully into and out of Glory’s thoughts; indeed, she works almost as if Glory were a first-person subject. We never enter the mind of another character, but from dialogue we can guess at the changes in their thoughts. The limited third person may express a kind of conviction on Robinson’s part; certainly, it accords with Glory’s heart-laboring attempt to see into the lives of others … Robinson attends to permanent departures, and these acts of rupture condense that condition of not knowing, of never being able to know, that she sees in all of our understandings.
