PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Rappaport’s book is crisply and intelligently written. She weaves her own research process into the narrative ... In focusing on the gaps in the record, Rappaport arguably skirts around some of the more uncomfortable elements in the story – elements it is important for us to confront more squarely if we are fully to understand the ways in which structural racism worked in the nineteenth century.
Jhumpa Lahiri
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)This is not a vastly eventful book ... but her Italian is not without style ... From the limitations of this new language she has since forged a voice that allows her to negotiate between the exterior world and the interiority of her narrator with a peculiar intensity. It is as if the non-reflexiveness of writing in Italian is forcing her to slow down, making her alive to tiny shifts of feeling as they unfold ... a stunningly brave mid-career decision not only to learn to speak and write a foreign language, but to create serious work in Italian. It has paid off. Lahiri’s humility, courage and intense attention have delivered this exquisite novel.
Anne Enright
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)...a breathtaking performance which whirls the reader from rural Ireland during the Second World War ... Actress is not necessarily an \'Irish\' book, and its language recalls the precision of Vladimir Nabokov, along with the sly revelations of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Madame de Staël’s exploration of female performance in Corinne, ou L’Italie ... Certainly, she writes \'the most extraordinary sentences,\' but reading or isolating her at this level, as many critics seem tempted to do, risks overshadowing how her sentences are pleated throughout, risks undermining the musicality of the entire composition ... Actress is a tour de force of half-concealed effects and slow-burning revelations that splutter suddenly into flame.
