"A young heir to Gunter Grass and Jose Saramago, Smilevski might be the newest of a rare thing--a living European novelist with a message for the future of his continent, with an imagination borne against inheritance with such force that even Spinoza might have approved." --<i><b>Forward</i></b>
"Not only does Smilevski fulfill the difficult task of explaining Spinoza's dense ideas, dropping sly references to Darwin and Kundera into 17th-century Dutch life, but he makes a hidden life wonderfully manifest." --European Jewish Press
"Through this extraordinary literary expedition, [Smilevski] gives the Spinoza 'hologram,' usually projected onto the pages of historic-philosophical studies, his peculiar double—a man of flesh and blood who paradoxically shares his lonely universe with all those existing, or to exist, similar to him."
—Ana Dimishkovska, Macedonian P.E.N. Review