The surface of Eley Williams’s writing, as readers of her short story collection Attrib. will already be aware, is one of lexical delight. The animating principle is the skittish, bumble-beeing motion of her navigation across sentences and phrases, which cross-pollinate one another sonically. Sentences are often musically connected, built on harmony or the felicity of anagram; her development is the stand-up’s callback as much as any linear drive. There’s a generosity to the writing’s willingness to pretend it’s the reader who is being clever by remembering something that has been placed firmly in their hand the whole time ... This un-aloneness is also crucial to Williams’s style, always to a lesser or greater extent about, and in itself an act of, love. There is warmth and brio directed toward the words — they are accomplices and fellow travelers — but as much as language is the stage on which Williams performs her balletic maneuvers, it has an answering pressure of its own ... There is a perfectly well-constructed plot here, but it almost feels beneath a book of this charm, energy, and syncopation to dwell too ploddingly on it. For all its brilliant set pieces and neat engineering, it is the means rather than the source of the joy to be found. One comes to Williams for sentences that ricochet and dazzle ... The novel could be twice as long again, operating as it does as an exercise in voice; it isn’t damning, I hope, nor faint praise to say this is a book that is more or less all aside, and all the better for it ... That said, it is a further example of Williams’s ability to interweave, to nod backward and forward, that she can also maintain a through-line, giving her characters — and, as importantly, their vocabulary — a sense of motion, a rounding-off of event ... The connections between the two narratives operate on both the grand and small scale, and they are never less than perfectly calibrated ... For a novel as finely tuned as this, to leave one with a sense of the intoxicating hopefulness of chance is its greatest achievement in a competitive field.
.. sheer joy. Although I cantered through the book and welcomed its distraction during lockdown, there are enough hidden jokes and cunningly disguised rabbit holes to make one want to return to it ... a novel of lists, alliterations, allusions, swirling meditations on language, dictionaries, gender, puns, linguistic jokes, text-emojis, grawlixs, tildes and even the author’s own neologisms — I shall use ‘splayground’ henceforth. As such it will endear itself to cruciverbalists and lingueccentrics, pedants and those who hate pedantry ... But — and it judiciously uses Dr Johnson’s definition of the novel, ‘a small tale, generally of love’ — it has heart as well as hijinks and hi-hats. It deals with love as something which cannot be put into words, and dare not speak its name (done neither stridently nor sentimentally). It is, in short, a delight.
Have you ever caught a Mountweazel? Before reading Eley Williams's beguiling first novel, I'd never heard of them. But Williams is an expert. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on them, and then she put her hard-earned knowledge to further good use in The Liar's Dictionary, which is to word lovers what potato chips are to my husband — minus the guilt ... Williams's novel raises questions about the instability of language, how words gain currency, and whether fake words are any less real than actual words ... The Liar's Dictionary belongs to a subgenre of historical fiction that toggles between two parallel narratives — set in the past and the present — which cleverly play off each other, unraveling mysteries and juxtaposing epiphanies in both strands ... The Liar's Dictionary, 'queasy with knowledge,' is an audacious, idiosyncratic dual love story about how language and people intersect and connect, and about how far we'll go to save what we're passionate about. It's hard not to love ... Read this clever volume for yourself, from A to Z.
You wouldn’t expect a comic novel about a dictionary to be a thriller too, but this one is. In fact, Eley Williams’s hilarious new book, The Liar’s Dictionary, is also a mystery, love story (two of them) and cliffhanging melodrama ... The Liar’s Dictionary is a raucous orgy of words. Williams juggles them, plays tunes with them, tries them on and takes them off, tastes them and spits them out. All the while, she’s using them to frame a thoughtful inquiry into truth and meaning. And her denouements are so satisfying that it would be agrupt to spoil them.
The success of Attrib. had readers keenly awaiting this first novel, and it doesn’t disappoint. A virtuoso performance full of charm ... There’s great skill in how the novel remains compact and focused while delivering satisfaction on multiple levels. It’s simultaneously a love story, an office comedy, a sleuth mystery and a slice of gaslit late Victoriana ... the tender depiction of a same-sex relationship built on a shared fondness for etymological fooling around recalls the early stories of Ali Smith, whose intellectually curious, free-range spirit Williams shares. And while it’s far from laboured, the novel underlines the difficulty of getting by as a graduate in London ... Williams keeps in sight big questions about language and identity. But as in Attrib., there’s nothing arid about these investigations; this is a novel full of fun. Williams writes with fine comic timing, in prose glinting with goodies ... Throughout, you feel in the safe hands of a storyteller dedicating their talent to our pleasure. The Liar’s Dictionary is a glorious novel – a perfectly crafted investigation of our ability to define words and their power to define us.
... a remarkable novel ... Original and often very funny, The Liar’s Dictionary is an offbeat exploration of both the delights of language and its limitations.
... spirited ... Dictionaries are plump and (mostly) written in earnest. This novel more resembles a bonsai tree — compact, wizened and funny ... Plot is not why a reader should come to The Liar’s Dictionary. One approaches it instead for highly charged neurotic situations and for Williams’s adept word-geekery. Her esotericism is always on cheerful display ... The author has a knack for summoning the peculiarities of her word people ... You have to like a novel in which the put-downs are mellifluous and on point ... If The Liar’s Dictionary sounds like it’s for you, it probably is. It’s for those who’d trade an entire NCAA football division for Mary Norris, Benjamin Dreyer, Lynne Truss, Jesse Sheidlower, Bryan Garner (no relation) and a dazzling first-round copy editor to be named later ... I enjoyed The Liar’s Dictionary without quite being able to let down my guard ... There’s a thin line, in books like this, between being playfully literate and being self-delighted, in trying too hard to charm. It’s the difference between a real bookstore and one that smells like potpourri, and between wit and whimsicality. Williams can strand herself on the wrong side of this line.
... an imaginative, funny, intriguing novel ... Williams ushers readers back and forth in time as Peter and Mallory wrangle with capricious office politics, unresolved romantic feelings and the assorted indignities of being human, often to hilarious effect. The author has a gift for writing set pieces and inner monologues that at first seem quotidian and then gradually spiral—or soar—into delightful absurdity ... In The Liar’s Dictionary, Williams has created a supremely entertaining and edifying meditation on how language records and reflects how we see the world, and what we wish it could be.
... entertaining ... While bringing the storylines to a convergence, Ms. Williams indulges in delightful digressions ... Underneath this novel’s extremely bookish mystery is the idea that our identities are as improvisatory as the words we affix to them, and that even the dictionary, the most seemingly staid and impartial arbiter of truth, is an 'unreliable narrator.'
In Williams’s writing, the simple words and actions don’t invalidate or override the hesitant, sidelong or circumlocutory ones: she is keen to make room for them all ... Though she’s interested in light touches and flickers, Williams has a taste for the joke squeezed until it yields its most absurdist juices ... a warm, intricate novel shaped by a powerfully humane and uncoercive intelligence. It’s a book of big ideas in a minor key. Sceptical about grand visions, it is also resistant to conclusion, so that perhaps the best kind of readerly tribute is to say: 'Of this novel I know not the meaning.'
... a delightfully exuberant, playful novel ... Definitely a story for logophiles and historical fiction devotees. It is decidedly clever, indeed literary, but it is a fascinating read and strangely amusing and eccentric. The oddest, but one of the best novels I’ve read so far in 2020.
It is a pity that we don’t learn more about Winceworth’s life outside of his workplace and the company of his fellow lexicographers ... The result is a certain sluggishness in some parts of the novel and a feeling that – disappointingly, in a work so concerned with vocabulary – not enough use is being made of the infinite possibilities offered by words, especially invented words.
For the most part it does not disappoint ... If the novel has a fault, it is the self-indulgence with which it meditates on the arbitrariness of language, a philosophical theme ridden to exhaustion by postmodernist fiction of the 1960s and ’70s. It is difficult to imagine any but the most academic of readers caring much for the opening disquisition on the 'perfect dictionary' ... It is only when the novel’s concern with the fickleness of language is explored with respect to the lives of Winceworth and Mallory that it becomes really compelling ... Where Williams really excels — other than in the assiduity with which she tests the power of language to articulate the world — is, on the one hand, in affectingly light-touched descriptions of tenderness and love, and, on the other, in the surreal rendering of comic scenes ... It seems likely that the sheer self-consciousness of Williams’s style will repel fully as many readers as it lures ... What is not open to doubt is that the intensity of Eley Williams’s imaginative vision — her capacity to tease the extraordinary from the ordinary — and her characteristically playful, occasionally preening but always warm prose single her out as one of the most promising young British writers to emerge in the past few years.
Williams’s book is about language itself, and in it words are both the brush strokes and the bigger picture ... The connections between Winceworth and Mallory are impressively detailed, and echo neatly back and forth one to another, effortlessly collapsing the decades between them. But these characters and their concerns are frequently overshadowed by the dynamic role that language itself plays in The Liar’s Dictionary. Far from mere mechanisms of storytelling, Williams’s words constantly call attention to themselves. Throughout the novel, language romps and preens, serving as playful trickster and creeping villain, hapless blunderer and penetrating blade. The book’s baroque, self-referential writing style combines medium and message in a messy maelstrom that intrigues and occasionally overwhelms. Through this kaleidoscopic lens, Williams interrogates the charged nexus where language 'meets' human experience—and the book’s humans’ experiences—and finds the connections there crucial, but faulty. While the book’s incisive meditation on language can make its human characters seem a bit fuzzy in comparison, The Liar’s Dictionary is not solely cerebral. Its esoteric leanings are balanced throughout with humor ranging from wry to ridiculous.
Unfolding in two distinct storylines – one past, one present – the book explores what it means to trust wholly in something that ultimately proves unreliable, either through one’s own actions or the actions of another. It is also a celebration of language and the people who devote their lives to studying and recording its many iterations. All that and it’s wildly funny as well. Plus, you might learn something ... A Liar’s Dictionary was the first book with a 2021 publication date that I read this year. I can only hope that it is indicative of the quality of work that I will experience going forward, because it is sharply smart, dryly funny and wonderfully written. If you love words and the mysteries behind them, then you’ll likely enjoy this book as much as I did.
Those familiar with Williams’s writing won’t be surprised to find that her characters are also in love with words ... Reading The Liar’s Dictionary, I spotted just one thing that initially looked like a 'bleurgh of vocabulary': 'I is for inventiveness (adj.)'. I felt like the proverbial cleaner in an art gallery, unsure whether a strange object is a piece of rubbish or part of the exhibition. And then I realized, to my joy, that this so-called 'adjective' must be a fictitious entry: not a copyright trap but a hoax played by the author on the reader (with or without the editor’s blessing). We might call it an experimental mountweazel.
The Liar’s Dictionary is Williams’ first novel, following the justly-acclaimed 2017 collection of short stories Attrib., and while fans of that book certainly won’t be disappointed with this one, they will find something rather different here. The Liar’s Dictionary begins in a familiar way with a preface which talks about what dictionaries are, can be, and could do. It addresses ‘you’ directly, it draws attention to itself as a physical object, it puns and plays and invites you to wonder. The preface draws on Italo Calvino and Ali Smith, and adds wonderfully to their legacy ... Even if [...] definitions reveal themselves as slippery things, dictionaries are an attempt to hold, and a way of choosing to do so. The tricky courtship of word and world, and how a book might hold a world, is essentially the theme of all dictionary fiction. The Liar’s Dictionary, an invaluable addition to that odd canon, ends up – I think – being all about one word, one that James Joyce (an encyclopaediac himself) called 'the word known to all,' the word love.
... a delicious love letter to language that readers of a sympathetic palate will devour ... Buried beneath the torrents of puns and linguistic riffing is a story about two people from different eras connected by the thread of language, free to invent and repurpose words as they please, but who are less adept at navigating that far more indefinable terrain: the human heart ... Expect sharply divided opinions here, but devoted fans of Ali Smith will gleefully succumb to Williams’s tale of acrobatic wordplay.
... comically inventive ... two surprising and emotionally satisfying conclusions. The author combines a Nabokovian love of wordplay with an Ali Smith–like ability to create eccentric characters who will take up permanent residence in the reader’s heart. This is a sheer delight for word lovers.
Steampunk meets philology ... [a] confection of love and language ... Williams, a charming stylist, is at her best when she’s writing breathlessly about the blossoming of romantic love ... Plentiful events—explosions, trysts, betrayals—give the impression of a lively plot, though key mysteries remain unresolved, particularly in Winceworth’s narrative. (What is the real identity of the mysterious beauty? What is the bully’s motive?) Surprisingly, the least exciting aspect of the novel is the vocabulary words, many of which word mavens may well already have encountered in listicles of, for example ... Nevertheless, people who read dictionaries for fun will likely enjoy the selection ... A sweet and diverting story, witty and sincere, from a promising newcomer.
