Dizzying, dreamlike ... One of the pleasures of the novel is how it turns you around, blurs the edges of things, plays tricks on your memory. Another is its elegant, compressed style ... A mood all its own: playful, irreverent, sardonic — and angry.
The stories of these untethered lives are broken apart, admixed, and rearranged, often asynchronously, in an attempt to approximate the fragmentation that results from seeing your ties to your homeland erased or made meaningless ... I don’t know that I have any clear answers about Álvarez’s novel, but do know that it is likely to endure and be built upon by whatever he writes next because, unlike so many of his fictional characters, he cannot stop thinking about his voluntary exile and the paradise that he left behind.
A hugely rewarding, polyphonic narrative of migration from Cuba. Through its characters’ rich and eccentric interior worlds, it gives articulation to people whose lives are often reduced to stereotypes and offers a new vision of migration ... The novel specialises in evocative accounts of the unspectacular ... The book remains capacious, irreducible and resistant to national allegory.
[A] magisterial translation ... It is a sprawling, polyphonic novel, fuelled by fury and empathy ... Time is compressed and stretched in this novel, which seems more determined to explore the disjointedness of expatriation than to pursue the conventions of linear storytelling. It is impressionistic and disorienting, but thrums with the truth of lived experience.
At first, Álvarez’s approach seems less prismatic than scrambled, which makes the narrative difficult to penetrate. But the deliberate lack of clear footholds is part of the point: He wants to emphasize the individuality of his characters’ journeys and blunt any reader’s attempt to reduce them to types ... A multivalent if often overly knotty portrait of alienation.
