[T]hese stories have shattered preconceived notions about novels and recast the bits into fresh forms…This bricolage surprisingly coheres by the novel’s end into an authentic expression of a mind striving to comprehend the inexplicable cruelties of the universe and humanity’s most proper response… Fans of Haruki Murakami’s melancholy, oneiric tales will also delight in Lim’s assault upon consensus reality. He encourages the reader to “stop making sense,” in the Talking Heads manner, and experience the universe as a magical tapestry of events whose overall pattern is perceivable only by God — or maybe after one’s own death.
—Paul Di Fillipo, Washington Post
i was very happy to receive this review in the Washington Post by Paul Di Filippo. it was a very gratifying review for me as it explicitly states some of my conceptual hopes and furthermore laid them out in a personal, insightful, and elegant style. at times it felt like a duet, so seen and well represented i felt. a sincere thanks to Paul Di Filippo.
[as an aside, the review does make a small and unimportant error by misnaming one of the characters as Muriel. (it’s truly not an important detail for a reader’s experience — but why it isn’t important is kinda important. (characters are a technology that evaporate within a greater and wider sense of personhood, might be brief summary of the/my argument.) but, to the reviewer’s credit, having an unnamed narrator is always confusing (and this one might have more than one). but, to clarify: the unnamed character that goes on the global hunt with Donna Winters for the AI/dog (in my non-authoritative authorial mind) is not Muriel.]