Esteemed literary critic Peter Craven has praised to the heavens my debut novel The Hands of Pianists .
In Saturday’s The Weekend Australian, he called it ‘virtuosic in its techniques and grand in its achievement’. Indeed, it’s hard to know where to start in quoting from Peter’s review. I’m over the moon, of course — Craven is the doyen of Australian critical writing.
He begins by calling Hands ‘an absolutely compelling literary novel’ written by a ‘born artist’. By the end of his review, which occupied most of the bottom of two pages, he’s saying that the book ‘breaks every rule about art I know but it gets away with it’.
I grapple to describe my own book, so the reviewer may be excused for his several perspectives on the text. It’s a ‘besotted nightmarish trip’ and a story of ‘heart-stopping horror’. It creates ‘pity and terror’ like a great actor rising to the challenge of King Lear. The writing has a ‘tremendous capacity to capture shade and colour and cadence’.
Rupert’s paywall makes it impossible to access the review online unless you are a subscriber. But there should be papers still around from Saturday, and you can fiddle with the pictures here to read the review.