PositiveThe Financial TimesIt is hard not to sympathise with Irvine Welsh, who said that anyone who got so worked up about a semicolon \'should get a f***ing life or a proper job\'. Yet Watson’s years thinking about it have done the world a favour. The semicolon is not a small thing. It leads straight to our insecurities about education and class ... Because she spent so long researching and writing, Watson has been able to make her book wondrously short. She has hunted down the very finest examples of semicolons in use, in order to prove how poorly rules serve us ... The aim of Semicolon is admirable; its effect on me has been counterproductive. Everything I read I now scan for any sign of this little punctuation mark. Far from helping me connect to meaning, my eyes are so peeled for a sighting of a semicolon I’m barely taking in any meaning at all.
Elena Ferrante, Trans. by Ann Goldstein
MixedThe Financial Times\"The personality of the writer that emerges is so intense, difficult, clever, moody, snappy, perfectionist and insecure it can’t help but influence our response to her fiction. It is also entirely at odds with what she has set out to achieve ... On the one hand is its author’s unusual, fierce intelligence. Her brand of angry feminism is attractive. So is her uncomfortable honesty about motherhood, friendship, families and about writing and reading. Yet underlying it all is a tiresome preciousness about her own work.\
Gay Talese
MixedThe Financial TimesThe Voyeur’s Motel is a weird, fascinating and thoroughly uncomfortable story built from layers of complicity ... Despite the moral discomfort and despite its astonishing sloppiness, The Voyeur’s Motel still makes creepily fascinating reading ... Yet the central question of what led him — a married man with two children and two successive wives each obliging enough to condone and even assist his vigils in the attic — to do this, is one Talese fails to answer satisfactorily.
