PanThe New York Times Book ReviewThis is a \'play it again, Sam\' kind of production, the novelistic equivalent of the showy orchestral chestnut \'Pines of Rome.\' Love Is Blind goes down easy, its pleasures are vaguely guilty, and upon setting it down, it swiftly vanishes from the mind ... But there’s no philosophical armature to Love Is Blind, only the most convoluted of bildungsromans ... There are halfhearted efforts to place the plot vividly in its time ... the book’s promise of eroticism ends up involving only some risible sex writing ... it’s depressing that he [Boyd] thought that classical music would be the perfectly complementary subject matter, as lovably hoary as the narrative style he is pantomiming. In any case, however, there are only flickers of the charm you would want to steadily emanate from such a period production. Love Is Blind eventually reminded me of a tired revival of one of Franco Zeffirelli’s decades-old, hyper-naturalistic stagings for the Metropolitan Opera: all surface detail, no life.
