Eprile fuses a searing political and cultural satire with a haunting coming-of-age story to render South Africa's turbulent past with striking clarity. [W.W. Norton]
Critic Reviews
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Favorable
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Library Journal Kellie Gillespie
Told with wry humor and heavy irony, this haunting story by a native South African details a young man's maturation in a difficult time and place, but it leaves the reader hoping that he will find happiness someday. [15 May 2004, p.114]
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Daphne Merkin
Charged with a shining imagination, The Persistence of Memory is reflective of everything that it meets up with, at once capacious and finely honed. Think Laurence Sterne meets Proust meets the antic, dissembling spirit of Stanley Elkin.
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Favorable
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Publishers Weekly
Eprile sometimes gets carried away on the tide of his acrobatic, erudite prose, but this is a clever, bitingly human bildungsroman.
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Favorable
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Booklist Hazel Rochman
American readers may not get all the jokes, but the strangeness of bigotry, both crude and paternalistic, is universal, and Eprile's sly footnotes give context and history. [1 May 2004, p.1544]
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Favorable
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The New York Times Book Review Theo Tait
It is exhilarating to see some of its well-worn tricks -- the unreliable narrator, the fable-like conceit, the learned digression -- deployed with such intensity and made so relevant to the bigger picture. Eprile, himself a South African now living in the United States, has written a novel that is not just clever but also a passionate fictional attempt to wake from a nightmare of historical complicity.
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Favorable
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Washington Post Frances Taliaferro
A richly imagined novel of growing up, its political revelations leavened by absurdist humor and social satire.
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Mixed
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TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Stephen Abell
Tony Eprile is least convincing when he allows his narrator to step back from the course of the narrative to analyse it, and needlessly succumbs to the impotence of being earnest.
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Mixed
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San Francisco Chronicle Martin Rubin
The trouble with Eprile as a novelist seems to be that he has bitten off more than he can chew.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Richard Eder
His narrator relinquishes our sympathy in favor of a gnarled and disjointed truth-telling. This makes The Persistence of Memory hard to read at times.
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Unfavorable
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Kirkus Reviews
Seems more a collection of set-pieces than an absorbing narrative with compelling characters.
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