Somewhat mystical ... Interweave[s] beautifully evoked memories of the author’s childhood in a poor and extended Catholic family in Tasmania ... To bring this richly layered book to a close Flanagan re-creates, in harrowing detail ... Significant.
Unusual, unpredictable and slippery ... What Flanagan achieves so well is locating what is intimately human within his grand sweep ... This is a book of big swings, not minor complaints. It might even be guilty at times of grandiosity, given how it draws a line backward from Flanagan’s birth through some of the most consequential events and scientific discoveries of the 20th century, but the writing exerts an irresistible power and carries us with it.
A mournful dirge for a natural realm savaged by saws and tractors and bulldozers.
More than a vivid recreation of one boy’s inner life, the book is also a mural of ideas ... His elegies ring clear and true.
It is not often that a book forces you to put it down repeatedly because you feel shaky. Question 7 did that to me. It is that good ... Memoir is fashionable just now. Question 7 sets the high-water mark for what the genre can be.
Extraordinary ... Beautiful, unclassifiable ... That it is a masterpiece is without question. Sebald himself would have been proud of the subtlety, the depth, the intensity of thought and feeling.
Flanaga weaves strands about his parents, Australian history, and the atomic bomb into a mesmerizing narrative tapestry in this dazzling, one-of-a-kind memoir ...
