"What distinguishes Kiš's novel is its authorial independence. A conventional narrative structure is ignored; it is the author's musings and diversions that magically build suspense. That he succeeds is a rare achievement." —Herbert Mitgang, New York Times

"A finely sustained, complex fictional performance. It is full of pain and rage and gusto and joy of living, at once side-splitting and a heartbreaker." —John Simon, Washington Post Book World

"Probably no other novelist has succeeded better than Kiš in making a densely stylistic pattern out of such a nightmare, conveying with gruesome but also aesthetically beautiful effect the interrelation in such a life at such a time of the quotidian and the apocalyptic, the combination of the sense of trivia with the sense of doom." —John Bayley, New York Review of Books