Publishers Weekly
04/17/2023
Rachman returns with a droll if uneven novel in stories, the form he used with such brilliance in The Imperfectionists, this time charting the lonely days of a Dutch novelist. Dora Frenhofer, it seems, is inventing fictional characters to replace the people no longer in her life. In her commitment to writing, she’s spurned friends and family, including her children, though her sacrifice hasn’t yielded many readers. Rachman’s narrative, in turn, comprises Dora’s stories. One, titled “The novelist’s estranged daughter,” takes the point of view of Dora’s daughter, Beka, a California comedy writer going stir crazy during the Covid-19 lockdown. Some are captivating, especially “The man who took all the books away,” a harrowing and Kafkaesque tale of a young Syrian man’s imprisonment for possessing a borrowed phone containing a video satirizing the country’s president. Others, though funny, have less heft, such as “A writer from the festival,” which tracks a third-rate novelist’s misadventures as he tries to promote his work (“Come one, come all,” reads his advertisement for a reading; in the end, Dora writes, “All couldn’t make it. Nor could one”). Rachman remains a master comic stylist, but here the whole is less than its gleaming parts. Agent: Natasha Fairweather, RCW Literary. (June)
From the Publisher
"Tom Rachman’s bustling, globe-trotting new novel manages to be about a writer’s life ending, quietly, lonesomely–even as it bursts with characters, plots, humor and drama. . . Rachman, a former A.P. foreign-news editor, has a far-and-wide imagination, and his novel is ingenious: investing a protagonist at the twilight of her life with grand, restless vision."—Vogue
"Rachman’s The Imperfectionists was a stunning elegy for newspaper journalism. Now, he turns his prodigious gifts to a novelist writing her own elegy through the scrim of dementia. Dora Frenhofer, 73 and at the end of a modestly successful career, decides to write her final book in her own voice “for a change,” each chapter about a different person in her life, and proves to be a highly critical — and perhaps highly unreliable — narrator."—Los Angeles Times
"With The Imposters, it’s as if Rachman is standing at the apex of his significant talent and sending his characters down the tracks of a roller-coaster, just to see where they land. Others may find it all to be screaming fun."—New York Times Book Review
“Readers who enjoy literary complexity will relish a book that reads like the love child of Cynthia Ozick and Tom Stoppard . . . This is a novel about storytelling, but it’s also about living. Kindness, cruelty, love, vanity, anger, loneliness and yes, sadness feature here. Rachman riffs brilliantly on art and the imagination, but he writes best about the human heart.”—The Washington Post
“Rachman’s nuanced exploration of creativity’s staying power, a writer’s inherent desire for relevance, and the marketplace’s malleable definition of success unfolds with refined subtlety through interconnected tales. The characters arguably each deserve of a novel of their own, yet it is Dora’s story Rachman focuses on with admiration and just a hint of awe.”—Booklist (starred)
"Reading The Imposters is like witnessing a high-wire alchemy act. Rachman breathes life into Dora Frenhofer, a lonely 73-year-old Dutch novelist, who then breathes life into her characters, who are themselves all writers—of poetry, of stand-up comedy routines, of fabricated news stories and restaurant reviews and sports articles. . . Rachman writes with generous gallows humor about deeply flawed people trying to make sense of their surroundings, often through the written word. His prose conveys a sense of joy, even when it pries into darker corners of human nature."—Publishers Weekly
"A grand tapestry of humanity...From the author of The Imperfectionists and The Italian Teacher comes the story of an octogenarian novelist desperate to finish her final book before it’s too late—and gets the chance to do just that during an isolated Covid lockdown"—Eliza Smith, Lit Hub
“A tapestry of riveting fictional stories . . . Rachman deals with dark subjects — death, the fear of irrelevance, terror of the unknown — but this beautifully written work is not depressing. With precision and dexterity, Rachman unfurls Dora's potent legacy and builds a convincing argument for the power of art and storytelling.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“A romp around the world . . . Rachman's book . . . aims a critical eye at the written word."—Associated Press
“Rachman is observant and funny in his take on how parents and partners damage their loved ones. Yet, Dora — the failed mother, halfhearted romantic partner and unfulfilled author — remains an oddly likeable presence: “She specified herself to be Dutch, therefore allowed to be blunt.” Ultimately, this is a beguiling book about the wear and tear of disappointments and the transformative value of storytelling. Failure and loss, Rachman notes, can also be material. As can a pandemic.”—Financial Times
"Despite its existential sadness and profundity, The Imposters is entrancing, light, witty, and often laugh-out-loud funny. Rachman’s prose is graceful, lucid, and seemingly effortless. His narrative, set amid the surreal social distortions of the coronavirus pandemic, is gripping and original. . . The Imposters takes the trends, pleasures, and anxieties of the epoch from which it springs and weaves them into a story that compels the engagement of sensitive and intelligent readers."—Washington Examiner
"Clever and full of tricks from start to finish . . . The Imposters is Tom Rachman’s fifth book in just over a decade. It is also his best – full of twists and surprises . . . Whether it’s 1970s India, modern-day LA or Syria, Rachman has a good ear for place and time, and changes gear effortlessly. Each chapter is a short story in its own right, but when key characters turn up again elsewhere, the connection invariably is with Dora, until you start to wonder whether they might be the creations of this novelist, whose memory is perhaps not as bad as we thought."—The Spectator UK
Praise for The Imperfectionists
"An acute debut . . . Rachman paints the characters’ small dramas and private disappointments with humanity and humor."—The New Yorker
“Marvelous . . . A rich, thrilling book that is both a love letter to and epitaph for the newspaper world . . . Mr. Rachman’s transition from journalism to fiction writing is nothing short of spectacular. The Imperfectionists is a splendid original, filled with wit and structured so ingeniously that figuring out where the author is headed is half the reader’s fun. The other half comes from his sparkling descriptions not only of newspaper office denizens but of the tricks of their trade, presented in language that is smartly satirical yet brimming with affection.”—Janet Maslin, New York Times
Praise for The Italian Teacher
"Engaging and subtle . . . Rachman appears in perfect control of his material . . . engrossing, by turns gently humorous . . . The Italian Teacher is a psychologically nuanced pleasure."—New York Times Book Review
“An exotic touch of intrigue arises in The Italian Teacher . . . deliciously ironic and deeply affectionate.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“A poignant, touching tale about living in the shadow of a brazen artistic genius . . . Unforgettable.”—USA Today
Vogue
His novel is ingenious: investing a protagonist at the twilight of her life with grand, restless vision.”
USA Today
A poignant, touching tale about living in the shadow of a brazen artistic genius . . . Unforgettable.
New York Times Book Review
Engaging and subtle . . . Rachman appears in perfect control of his material . . . engrossing, by turns gently humorous . . . The Italian Teacher is a psychologically nuanced pleasure.
The New Yorker
An acute debut . . . Rachman paints the characters’ small dramas and private disappointments with humanity and humor.
Lit Hub Eliza Smith
A grand tapestry of humanity...From the author of The Imperfectionists and The Italian Teacher comes the story of an octogenarian novelist desperate to finish her final book before it’s too late—and gets the chance to do just that during an isolated Covid lockdown
New York Times Janet Maslin
Marvelous . . . A rich, thrilling book that is both a love letter to and epitaph for the newspaper world . . . Mr. Rachman’s transition from journalism to fiction writing is nothing short of spectacular. The Imperfectionists is a splendid original, filled with wit and structured so ingeniously that figuring out where the author is headed is half the reader’s fun. The other half comes from his sparkling descriptions not only of newspaper office denizens but of the tricks of their trade, presented in language that is smartly satirical yet brimming with affection.
The Washington Post Ron Charles
An exotic touch of intrigue arises in The Italian Teacher . . . deliciously ironic and deeply affectionate.
Kirkus Reviews
2023-03-28
The final manuscript by an elderly novelist whose memory is failing is the springboard for a meditation on the creative process and the loneliness of the writer’s life.
Dora Frenhofer was never a bestselling author, and over the years her “succession of small novels about small men in small crises” have sold fewer and fewer copies for smaller and smaller publishers. Now, 73 years old and isolated in her London home by the pandemic lockdown, she works desultorily on a new novel written in her own voice (“not pretending to be anyone else for a change”), with each chapter centered on a different character. These chapters alternate with diary entries that describe Dora’s experiences during the lockdown and end with various crossed-out sentences that eventually lead to the opening of the next chapter. Each chapter’s protagonist is someone connected to Dora: her estranged daughter, her brother, an immigrant hired to clear out her house, a fellow participant in a literary festival, a bicycle deliveryman, a former lover, and a longtime friend. She invents stories for them—an unrequited love, imprisonment and torture, the murders of two children—that are slowly revealed to be Dora’s embroidery of events from her own history. Or are they? Nothing is for certain in an intricately braided narrative that constantly suggests new possibilities about the factual underpinnings of fiction. The characters are viewed through Dora’s uncharitable eyes; the compassion for damaged souls that suffused such earlier Rachman novels as The Rise & Fall of the Great Powers and The Italian Teacher is still in evidence here, but it’s muffled by Dora’s brutally blunt judgments of their personal failings and professional failures—and her own. The interplay among various versions of the characters’ links to Dora is fascinating, and Rachman’s prose is lucid and elegant, as always. But the bleak tone throughout, culminating in an appropriately grim conclusion, makes this austere novel difficult to engage with emotionally.
Fine, uncompromising work likely to prompt admiration more than wholehearted appreciation.
