SOURCE: “After the Fall,” in Chicago Tribune, January 3, 1993, Section 13, p. 3.

In the following review, Gosswiller asserts that the style of Barnes's The Porcupine is different from his earlier novels due to its subject matter.

A truly powerful short novel is a rare event. Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, with its confessions of a social misfit, and Thomas Mann's “Death in Venice,” the story of a pederast, come immediately to mind. Both characters, reprehensible in society, were new to literature. Julian Barnes's The Porcupine, focusing upon a type of individual as much scorned today as the protagonists of Dostoyevsky and Mann were then, is a work of similar power.

Stoyo Petkanov is an old-school communist hardened by prison in the 1930s, a crafty, ruthless politician with an enormous ego. With the fall of communism, he was deposed as president of his former Iron Curtain country, which bears some resemblance...