“Pure magic…. I cannot think of another novelist with Naipaul's feeling for the distinctiveness of cultures…. A fine book and no one but Naipaul could have written it.”
—S. R. B. Iyer, The Columbus Dispatch
“Nuanced and evocative…. Here, sentence by sentence, is the consummate craftsmanship, the perception, the precision, the style the Nobel committee lauded as ‘vigilant.’ Here, too, is Naipaul giving rein to comical talents that may not have been at full stretch since he published the incomparable A House for Mr. Biswas in 1961.”
—The Globe and Mail
“[A] gem of a novel…. [Naipaul's] descriptive powers are masterful, and his language spare and economical. Every word counts and conveys meaning…. A very well-crafted and brilliant novel of ideas.”
—The Orlando Sentinel
“A surprise and a pleasure…. Naipaul has produced the most complex and demanding body of work of any post-war British writer…. In sentences of great precision and balance, [he] reanimates the dilemmas of late and post-colonial experience…. He is without peer.”
—The Observer Review
“Beautifully imagined and subtly satiric…. Naipaul presents [a] disturbing social vision in prose that seems stripped of all emotion and yet proves emotionally powerful.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Naipaul writes a prose as clean as a stripped wand, but however plain the language, the ideas it delivers are not…. He is still peerless as a deviser of the shocking icon. He builds a scene of metaphysical loss as compelling as any Renaissance canvas of the expulsion from paradise.”
—The Independent
“A challenging, tantalizing book that … blossoms in the imagination of the reader.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“Almost casually, but beautifully, achieved…. Captures in miniature the trajectory of Naipaul's oeuvre.”
—The Times Literary Supplement
“The latest example of how powerful the search for identity can be in literature.”
—The Buffalo News
“A brief, insightful study of the development of a highly inventive writer.”
—The Seattle Times
