SOURCE: Fowles, John. “The Sound of a Voice that Continues.” Spectator 274, no. 8703 (29 April 1995): 40.

In the following review, Fowles compliments Still for its sense of irony and original narrative voice.

I finished this brilliantly jumped second novel, the traditionally tough fence, of a writer whose first I had much admired three years ago, in foreign parts—to be precise, deep in the Alentejo of Southern Portugal, perched over a lake in the shade of an olive tree amid a landscape as full of spring flowers as it was of appropriately mocking hoopoes and cuckoos (you need only change one consonant to grasp what they really say). A cat among the cistus, I was purring. ‘Great’ is a foolish boomerang to throw at the living, yet here …

Especially if you take Still not only in its obvious cinematic sense, but that of ‘notwithstanding’, it makes a fitting stele to mark...