MixedThe London Review of BooksRush’s attempt to see America from Africa, or, more accurately, to understand America and Americans in part through their effect on Africa and its effect on them, gives his writing distinctive resonance ... But the inevitable inner distance of his expatriates from their adopted setting also makes Rush’s Botswana and its native population more of a picturesque backdrop than a thickly realised world ... There may be no way for a contemporary author to permit himself to try to write fully from within another culture, but if it is ethically impossible to negotiate the antithetical traps of writing from abroad as either coloniser or tourist, that is a fascinating problem in itself, and it would be interesting to see a novelist of Rush’s seriousness engage with it more directly.
W. G. Sebald
MixedThe Los Angeles TimesAusterlitz is the story of one such bitter attempt to wake up into history's nightmare, and it is Sebald's most direct confrontation so far with the aftereffects of the genocide … The photographs embedded in Austerlitz, as in all of Sebald's books, seem less mannered and arbitrary here because the narrative itself turns so powerfully on the need to preserve whatever fragments one can against the ruin of forgetfulness … The numerous interminable hesitations and digressions, although thematically justifiable as Austerlitz's way of avoiding more disturbing, personal questions, are simply too long and too improbable to sustain one's interest.
