Daisy Hildyard at The Guardian:
From his debut, Love Notes from a German Building Site, through The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth, all Duncan’s novels share a meticulous, patient narrative voice. While some have leaned on a blurry psychological disintegration for their denouement, here the conclusions are more definite: with economic gestures, he offers glimpses of the characters’ new worlds. The novel often reads as a realist Irish rural story: hens underfoot, cold black tea on the table, drizzle. Catherine, so dignified, with a bone-deep sadness contracted via childhood tragedy, could almost be a William Trevor character. But in Duncan’s fiction that tradition converges with a cerebral European mode that is drawn to philosophy, architecture, madness and exile. I can’t think of another writer who draws from the same seams in any comparable way.
The prose is exceptionally, perhaps deceptively, straightforward. When Alois makes dinner, he “sets a dark pot on his range to boil. He then lifts a skillet from the wall and begins to heat it up. He takes butter from his tiny pantry and carves a half-inch cube from it. Then he takes a delph pot from a cupboard and from it lifts two eggs, with which to prepare an omelette.”
more here.
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