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The Persistence of Memory
A Novel
by Tony Eprile


10.0

based on 10 reviews
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based on 2 votes
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Official Publisher Site

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]

W. W. Norton & Company, 288 pages
06/2004
$24.95

ISBN: 0393058883

Fiction
Historical Fiction

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

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]

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.

Publishers Weekly

Eprile sometimes gets carried away on the tide of his acrobatic, erudite prose, but this is a clever, bitingly human bildungsroman.

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]

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.

Washington Post Frances Taliaferro

A richly imagined novel of growing up, its political revelations leavened by absurdist humor and social satire.

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.

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.

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.

Kirkus Reviews

Seems more a collection of set-pieces than an absorbing narrative with compelling characters.

The average user rating for this book is 10.0 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

[Anonymous] gave it a10:
A superb tale told with authenticity and humor.

Alison L gave it a10:
This is a brilliantly written, haunting, important novel. It deserves all the awards it has received, and more. Thank God for Eprile. The literary novel that you can't put down is not something often found these days.

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The Persistence of Memory A Novel by Tony Eprile

The Persistence of Memory
A Novel
by Tony Eprile