A challenge even to a reader familiar with Ariel Dorfman’s highly charged work ... Sophisticated and complex ... The sense of menace increases with each inconclusive sentence ... The bleak message of the novel will seem both inevitable and inescapable.
A fog of evasions, deceptions and lies gradually dissolves the outlines of characters and frays the plot of Konfidenz into free-floating questions that are never answered ... Builds a harrowing, chilly, erotic tension ... He frequently interrupts the novel with italicized ruminations about the ambiguous events unfolding, as if he were as helpless as the characters to predict or control the outcome. But his efforts leave readers perplexedly suspended in an allegorical limbo, befuddled rather than engaged ... His hopeful ending is a fantastical leap of faith, and too late.
Tantalizing ... Posing as a World War II story, Dorfman’s novel is best characterized as a finely tuned investigation into obsession and trust during major worldwide political instability.
The gifted and versatile Dorfman's new novel, written almost entirely in dialogue, develops an almost unbearable intensity ... A political novel as well as an acute study in character and obsession ... Exhilarating for its finely tuned unfolding but somber in its conclusions, Konfidenz demands a fundamental reexamination of the nature of trust.
A taut political allegory that ambitiously takes on, but doesn't quite resolve, big questions of loyalty, ideology, and truth ... Heartfelt, but too much packed into a small space, with characters who are political billboards rather than real people.
