RaveThe Brooklyn RailThe first thing that must be said about Eleanor...is that it is great fun. There is nothing so distinct as a screwball protagonist, a comic plot, or innumerable one-liners that we can attribute this enjoyment to—rather, it is simply found evenly distributed everywhere throughout the tone and shape and feel of Moschovakis’s work: the words she chooses to place together, the movement of her sentences, the ironic pleasures that come from her interpolation of two narratives set in different, but related planes of reality ... oftentimes self-reflexive, self-commentating, and self-conscious, but never precious or purposeless ... A book about the inner lives of our contemporaries must be conversant with how it feels to live right now, and at this Eleanor excels. Not in the weak sense of name-dropping popular websites, fashionable trends, and political slogans, rather in the much stronger sense of understanding how we use those things to construct our identities and live our lives ... Moschovakis has created a novel of great strength and flex. Much as it bends and twists and gyres, it does not break, in fact only accumulates more tensile strength from the motion, just as, one hopes, we all can do.
Michael Ondaatje
MixedThe San Francisco\"Most comfortable as an observer, Nathaniel’s passivity can make Warlight at times satisfyingly methodical and contemplative, and at others slow and frustratingly peripheral ... In this latest book, Ondaatje largely eschews robust characters and gripping plotlines to instead spend his creative energies on atmosphere, observation and theme. This is something of a departure, as the author’s spare novels have typically given a feeling of energetic movement and lifelike realism despite their reticence. Warlight feels more akin to the playful absurdity of Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, and at its best it embraces a postmodern two-dimensionality that works in sync with its absurd feel. But at other times it seems to work against its own impulses, as though it hopes we take seriously things that are very hard not to laugh at ... Ondaatje tantalizes us with these alternative histories resting just beyond the story we have, each of his characters only ever picking out the patterns within their own small sphere of illumination. The frustrations of Warlight’s cul-de-sac-like plotlines ultimately serve to remind us that all of our stories will be necessarily incomplete — we are all always operating in the titular half-light.\
