PositiveBrooklyn RailMárquez’s mastery lies in his effortless interplay of imagery with emotions, sharply exposing how women’s sense of self-worth and sexuality are inextricably linked to their physical appearance, and the inevitability of aging ... In a style reminiscent of the postcolonial magical realism he defined, Márquez blends the banal with the beautiful, the enchanting with the humdrum, and the ironic with the prophetic.
Salman Rushdie
RaveThe ObserverDelightfully self-aware, sometimes tongue-in-cheek with its irony.
Hanya Yanagihara
PositiveObserverDoubtlessly, it’s difficult to read a 720-page book teeming with excessive trauma, nor is it always pleasant. And yet, the experience of reading her novel is similar to watching a newsreel of the past couple years, the spread of the pandemic and the irresponsibility of right-wing governments in handling it. Yanagihara’s elegant prose, leveling tension and then sprawling into excessive, sometimes mindless, anecdotes of violence is not dissimilar to actually experiencing the blunt shock of trauma–over and over again. For many of us exposed to the racial politics in the novel, the intergenerational trauma that pits child against parent, the alienation and reaction of identity, and even more crucially, the near-animalistic scrabble for survival in an authoritarian society with limited resources to go around, it’s extremely relatable ... The unrelenting barrage of sickness, death, physical violence, narcissistic grandparents and lovers, and unrequited love subverts the typically-held expectations of what a good story should be, the fable that offers a moral in the end, or the literary conventions of exposition, climax and conclusion ... Yanagihara does not offer us a way out. Instead, she simply presents a mirror to the reality we live in, and depicts the anguish of her characters when they try, and fail, to protect and nurture their loved ones.
