MixedIrish Times (IRE)Calista...is a lightly-sketched character. Despite her centrality in the story, her private life is portrayed with...suggestive evasiveness ... While this technique can work effectively and humorously on film, and is appropriate for a suspense-driven novel, it does not work here ... There is a slight possibility that Calista’s limp characterisation is deliberate: like most female characters in Wilder’s oeuvre, she fails the Bechdel test. Such a tricksy intertextual tribute may please Wilder’s fans, but not Coe’s ... Coe’s usual cohort of fans will otherwise be bemused by the inconsistent style and tone of Mr Wilder & Me, much as contemporary audiences and critics were bemused by the ill-fated Fedora.
Francis Spufford
PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)By choosing five characters from a similar geographical area of London, Spufford demonstrates the fickle nature of opportunity, the importance of luck, and also the constancy and reinvention of the self that happens throughout a lifetime ... There are so many passages of dazzling lucidity in Light Perpetual, and the discrete characters allow Spufford to display his poetic prowess in a variety of contexts ... However, it is London itself that provide the most transcendent moments in this fine, if misdirected, novel ... Spufford delivers this to the reader in juicy morsels, providing a rich and textured study of a city and some of the many hidden lives that it has punished and nurtured with its formidable indifference.
Viv Groskop
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)... offers the reader a handy shortcut through the hard graft of learning these lessons for oneself ... Part-memoir, part-cultural analysis, Au Revoir, Tristesse is composed of 12 short chapters, each framed by a pithy, witty epithet that summarises the thrust of Groskop’s central thesis: that books play an important role in helping us to navigate the emerging narratives of our own lives ... Her readings are biographically as well as textually informed, and she never passes up the opportunity to use titillating titbits of historical lore to animate her argument ... the best parts of Au Revoir, Tristesse are when Groskop describes the changing nature of her relationship with France and the books that had such a crucial part in her self-definition ... Groskop\'s re-evaluation of her own relationship to the books says something urgent about literature’s ability to challenge us as well as \'escape ourselves and find a better way to live\'. It is also a great argument for rereading, a neglected indulgence in these nouvelle-worshipping, time-poor days ... The personal story that Groskop presents as a backdrop to this cultural exploration is not, however, in any way, exceptional. It offers simple, universal truths that even those illiterate in the French language will relate to.
