When translator Edgar Logan arrives from his home in Paris to work in Edinburgh he anticipates a period of enlightenment and calm. But after a chance meeting with the philosopher Harry Sanderson and his captivating artist wife, Edgar's meticulously circumscribed life is suddenly propelled into drama and crisis. The survivor of a solitary childhood and a breakdown in his student days, Edgar instinctively holds emotion and disorder at bay; while Sanderson - anarchic, paranoid and brilliant - is on the brink of a nameless mania, seemingly intent on destroying all he has created.
Reviews
The Spectator
Cressida Connolly
“These are well- drawn characters and their story becomes ever more absorbing. Jennie Erdal is a writer of great precision, delicacy and control ... This is a writer of rare assurance and intelligence. Admirers of Iris Murdoch will feel very much at home here.”
17/03/2012
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The Independent on Sunday
Boyd Tonkin
“Erdal's novel niftily stitches ideas about happiness, sanity, memory, translation and imagination into a plot that pivots on an even more fundamental concept: love. To invoke Iris Murdoch or Michael Frayn here is not to slight the distinctiveness of Erdal's voice – merely to hint at the spread of thoughtful pleasures that await her readers.”
07/07/2012
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The Times
Kate Saunders
“There’s too much about Hume, but Erdal’s writing is intelligent and compelling, and she has a fine eye for the dynamics of sexual relationships.”
10/03/2012
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The Sunday Times
Peter Parker
“Although the novel is not without its moments of wry humour, the forceful and funny voice of Erdal’s memoir is nowhere apparent. Instead there is the almost affectless Edgar, whom Erdal fleshes out by providing him with a background that is both alarming and bizarre (including a mother who keeps his miscarried elder siblings in jars), but who remains disconcertingly blank. This, however, makes the concluding parts of the novel, in which he finally comes alive during a holiday in the Hebrides with Carrie and her schizophrenic son, all the more moving.”
25/03/2012
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The New Statesman
Jonathan Derbyshire
“The Missing Shade of Blue is best understood, I think, as an essay, in the guise of a novel, on Hume's view of the relationship between philosophy and the pleasures and commerce of what he called "common life". Whether fiction is the best home for Erdal's keen intelligence and gently undermining, thoroughly Humean, scepticism remains to be seen.”
26/03/2012
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The Daily Mail
Eithne Farry
“Erdal’s slow-moving, metaphor-packed novel ambitiously deals with weighty matters - artistic integrity, the veracity of translation, love and loss - but her characters are too freighted with their philosophical and artistic dilemmas to be emotionally engaging.”
22/03/2012
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The Guardian
Justine Jordan
“These are deep waters and dense themes, marshalled with a light touch and a dry wit. We learn a lot about the zen of fly fishing, the romance of bookselling and the merits of David Hume. Too much of the book, though, is aperçu-stuffed and relentlessly discursive, whether it's Edgar and Harry conducting boozy Socratic dialogues or Edgar and Carrie earnestly agreeing with each other about how ineffable and mysterious translation and painting are. The novel's riffs on fictionality, meanwhile, have become over-familiar.”
13/04/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Catherine Taylor
“For a novel rumbling with tragedy, Erdal prefers to take a discursive and dispassionate path, with uneven results. Harry denounces cod philosophers yet the musings which Edgar trots out mirror those same banalities, and while his half-hearted search for contentment parallels Hume’s elusive “missing shade of blue”, the ambivalence at its core only encourages indifference to the outcome.”
27/03/2012
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