Gopegui’s novel brilliantly steps into the middle of volatile and troubling debates about artificial intelligence, ethics and the meaning of personhood ... The writing, in Mark Schafer’s fine translation, remains cultured and probing.
With recent advances in Artificial Intelligence, Stay This Day and Night With Me nevertheless already feels slightly dated ... The fact that it's never clear whether or not Mateo and Olga are "real", or merely characters the writers of the application invent, or at least re-shape, to make their case is also a double-edged approach that seems to undermine their case against Google as much as it makes it ... It's an interesting idea, and quite well presented, but does fall short of its potential.
While these philosophical exchanges walk the line between tedious rambling and mesmerizing contemplation, the book's more interesting moments occur when the narrators apostrophize Google to varying effect ... Timely, contemplative metafiction that overrelies on the amusing, if quickly exhausted, charm of its conceit.
