MixedThe GuardianI could say that it's about Alexis de Tocqueville...but only if ‘about’ means ‘more or less inspired by’. Olivier de Garmont's personality and career resemble Alexis de Tocqueville's in some respects, not at all in others … So, exactly as its title promises, the book is about Parrot and Olivier in America; but it's not about America. Its picture of the coarse, young United States of Andrew Jackson – based largely on De Tocqueville, of course, and I think also on later observers such as Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens – is entertaining, if predictable … The narrative proceeds in leaps and bounds, sometimes with a hop backwards, omitting connections, giving an impression above all, perhaps, of confusion – confusion of event and motive, incomprehension, a vast drama without structure.
Curtis Sittenfeld
PanThe GuardianThe five Bennet sisters and their parents speak to one another only in this style: peevish and self-assertive, relentlessly striving for wit through mere insult. Any differentiation of character is hard to perceive through the artificiality and monotony of the dialogue. Lydia and Kitty can be shown as more disagreeable than Liz and Jane only by the slightly greater coarseness of their language ... I wondered what could possess a writer to tie her novel so blatantly and rigidly to a very well-known one – taking the general plot and the name of every character, so that comparison with the original becomes as unavoidable as it is crushing.
Yann Martel
PanThe GuardianThe High Mountains of Portugal, in Yann Martel’s novel of that name, turn out to be grassy uplands rather than high mountains; and the book turns out to be three stories rather than a novel. The stories, connected ingeniously, vary greatly in tone and quality. The first two display so little of the author’s narrative skill that they may offer more temptation to stop reading than to go on. Liking the last part of the book much better, I could wish that it stood alone.
Salman Rushdie
MixedThe GuardianRushdie has a fractal imagination: plot buds from plot, endlessly. There are at least 1,001 stories and substories, and nearly as many characters. All you need to know is that they’re mostly highly entertaining, amusing and ingenious.
