PositiveThe New York TimesWe start their journey, in other words, where they disembark – which suggests an implacable resistance to sentimentality even as it grants an unexpected sort of mercy. Joseph and Celice are dead, murdered. Everything we'll learn eventually leads to this, but in backward-running time … The time spent with the corpses, as we might expect, is memorable. The scene of their death – they're both brained with a chunk of granite – is handled with a dispassionate, impressionistic brio … Few novels are as unsparing as this one in presenting the ephemerality of love given the implacability of death, and few are as moving in depicting the undiminished achievement love nevertheless represents.
