The book soon becomes a kind of meditation on the possibilities of fiction. Frequently terrifying words, some readers will feel; but the author's post-modernist bag of tricks also contains a whip-crack narrative skill that's as reminiscent of Dickens as it is of Roberto Bolaño…
It fizzes with the effervescence a large book can have when its author is in total control of the material. This isn't a story; it's the unfolding of an entire world, a mirror-land that seems familiar but is always ineffably strange.
Syjuco is a writer already touched by greatness, but his truly uncommon gifts delight all the more when they are permitted to emerge subtly, without overture. This is a remarkably impressive and utterly persuasive novel. Its author, unlike Crispin, may one day succeed with the Nobel committee." Joseph O'Connor, the Guardian
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Picador |