SOURCE: Quinn, Paul. “To Be, Or To Be Revenged?” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5182 (26 July 2002): 6-7.

In the following review, Quinn lauds the selection of essays presented in Invisible Author and notes that the collection serves as a valuable resource for long-time champions of Brooke-Rose's novels.

Christine Brooke-Rose claims there is something of a taboo against writers publishing accounts of their own work, on contemplating their own novels, as it were. When the work is especially ingenious or structurally complex, however, some have felt an understandable compulsion to parse their prose. Raymond Roussel, for example, couldn't resist a final word on the elaborate, punning procedures that generated his texts; and final word it was: How I Wrote Certain of My Books was only published posthumously. Umberto Eco produced some magisterial Reflections on “The Name of the Rose” under the clamouring pressure of an international readership, citing self-scrutinizing precedents like...