Praise for
The Neruda Case "The twists and turns of the quest through Mexico City, Havana, East Berlin, and La Paz deftly weave the personal and the political in a doleful exploration of the ways in which romantic and revolutionary ideals inevitably founder. Neruda himself...is unforgettably conjured." -
The New Yorker "The summer's most evocative fiction." -
The New York Times T Style Magazine "An auspicious introduction....The book is often wryly funny, even in the face of tragedy.... Let's hope that more books in Ampuero's Brulé series find an English-speaking audience." -
Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Ampuero offers a provocative depiction of Neruda, a man reevaluating his marriages and love affairs and feeling fresh remorse for having forsaken a hydrocephalic daughter to concentrate on his poetry... Vivid... Although
The Neruda Case is a prequel for his international readers, here in the United States, it should be a prologue for more novels from this shrewd and serious-minded novelist." -
The Washington Post "A superb translation by Carolina de Robertis whips the first of Ampuero's novels to be published in English into a pulsing, panting work." -
The Daily Beast "Ampuero, a University of Iowa professor, is highly regarded in South America, and U.S. readers looking for good literary detective fiction might find themselves falling in love with Cayetano Brulé." -
NPR "A moving fictional interpretation of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda's final days ... sings with poetic metaphor...Read this one as much for the story as for the wonderful way Ampuero has with words." -
Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Mix ever-tightening suspense, South American history, the fictional treatment of a major world poet, revolutionary turmoil and a reluctant sleuth and you've got a novel that is hard to put down and easy to remember....Ampuero's prose, as rendered in the translation of Carolina de Robertis, is brilliant....The ragged emotions of fear, of ardent partisanship, of guilt, of – you name it – are registered marvelously....To call his book a noir thriller does not begin to suggest the sophistication and richness of this gorgeously textured novel....It takes Roberto Ampuero to hold such fictitious and actual worlds in resonant suspense." -
Washington Independent Review of Books "Not just for mystery fans–or readers of Latin American literature." -
Library Journal "Glittering....A suspenseful, atmospheric mystery....The English-speaking world would be well-served by more translations of Ampuero's work." -
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