“There Is A Crack in Everything, And Through It The Light Comes In – exceptional, tree-like, and with a conclusion full of hopeful transcendence that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.... This novel, renewing the author’s commitment to a style whose intelligence—a constant catalyst for ideas—is compatible with intense emotion (some of these pages contain the most beautiful passages you will read this year about love, with its misunderstandings, its clashes with the individual, loneliness or expectation).”

“Pron’s deliberately difficult books are books that resist being written, that ultimately prevail, and they emerge with a force as great as their apparent naturalness. And while we are used to reading books with a lot of heart that still lack soul, well-intentioned projects without true literary substance, the opposite is true of Pron’s books—they are surrounded by a kind of strange coldness that is later completely dispelled, an air that is foreign and almost prickly that ends up warming up. The fire in his new novel is, as always, in the tone, but also in the subject matter: something like the collective damage stemming from a flood of individual suffering. The post-pandemic spirit, climate confusion, desperate migrations, Trump not as a symptom but as a symbol, or the things that were once good and that we needed but have now been subjected to all sorts of corruption, plundering, and cheapening—these things all give an imprecise form to a novel built on digressions. And that structure, backed by footnotes, makes it, I suppose, difficult to read on an electronic device, which would be enough for me to like it. The New York portrayed here (“it’s not well lit,” “it’s not exactly a place, but a speed”…) is very reminiscent of Teju Cole’s in Open City: it’s that same chant, that hallucinatory and sublime prose that serves so well as a soundtrack to our inert time, as full of possibilities as it is of fear, grief, and frustration”