text: Writing in ''The New York Review of Books'', the novelist and critic Joyce Carol Oates described the novel as “remarkable…an adventure story of sorts, echoing not only the canonical Heart of Darkness but F Scott Fitzgerald’s ''The Great Gatsby'', the novels of dislocation and inquiry of Graham Greene and W.G. Sebald, and…the spy novels of John le Carré…and a novel of ideas, a compendium of epiphanies, paradoxes, and riddles clearly designed to be read slowly and meditatively; one is moved to think of Thomas Mann’s ''The Magic Mountain''…this powerful debut…is a unique work of fiction bearing witness to much that is unspeakable in human relationships as in international relations.”