PositiveWashington ExaminerCompelling ... Wayne is a gifted writer with a talent for deft sketching ... Wayne isn’t quite a satirist. I think his project is more earnest than that. But his scenes of bourgeois socializing have their own kind of mercilessness ... One of Wayne’s other strengths is capturing thought on the page — the ways in which we flatter ourselves, or overanalyze, or rationalize even as we brush aside our knowledge that we’re rationalizing ... The novel’s plotting is tight, meticulous, perhaps even slightly too neat, and there are some parts, particularly the subplot about Paul’s relationship with the cable news producer, where Wayne slightly stretched my suspension of disbelief, though hardly enough to affect my enjoyment of the book.
Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer
MixedThe Washington Examiner... an example in equal measure of Bolano’s brilliance and his ability to madden and tax the reader ... The second of the three stories, \'French Comedy of Horrors,\' is the most conventional in storytelling structure, if not subject, and the most accessible and engaging as a standalone novella ... The other two novellas, \'Cowboy Graves\' and \'Fatherland,\' are longer, more difficult, and perhaps better reserved for Bolano completists ... All in all, Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas is a mixed bag and probably not the best place for readers new to Bolano to start.
