The Street Sweeper (79 page)

Special mention should be made of Robert Nowak whom I met through his work as a guide at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. In the course of our work together over six visits he went from being a trusted guide and expert in the history of the camp to a dear friend and confidant. I doubt if I could have endured the hours there necessary to write the book without the benefit of his encouragement, linguistic skills, intellect, knowledge, grace, humour and his insistence that this story had to be told. A fine son of Poland, he is living proof that his home town of Oswiecim is not Auschwitz.

Harry Perlman deserves to be singled out for the critical attention he lavished on the many incarnations of this book over the many years of its creation. For not the first time, his close reading and thoughtful advice proved invaluable and cannot be repaid in words alone.

Praise for
Seven Types of Ambiguity

‘Compulsively readable.’

—
The New Yorker

‘Bustling, kaleidoscopic … There are traces of Dickens’s range in Perlman and of George Eliot’s generous humanist spirit … This is an exciting gamble of a novel, one willing to lose its shirt in its bid to hold you … Stay with it for the long haul. It’s worth it.’

—The New York Times Book Review
, Editors’ Choice and Notable Book of the Year

‘This is a love story in the 19th century tradition, the kind that makes the real world seem a bit dim … George Eliot down under.’

—Kirkus Reviews
, starred review

‘Nuanced, dynamic storytelling, layered with essential digressions on everything from psychiatry to the stockmarket.’

—The Washington Post

‘Dazzling … a page turner, a psychological thriller that is, in short, dangerous, beguiling fun.’

—Newsweek

‘Elliot Perlman’s
Seven Types of Ambiguity
is an exemplary novel in the tradition of Thomas Hardy and the earlier D. H. Lawrence. Perlman’s power is in conveying the strife between personality and character in each of his protagonists. His prose, like his story itself, is vivid, humane, and finally optimistic in a manner that strengthens the reader’s perceptiveness.’

—Harold Bloom

‘Motives are tangled, perceptions unreliable, and outcomes unexpected … [Perlman] has created a novel with just the right amount of meaning, intelligence, and beauty.’

—
The Boston Globe

‘Perlman writes with such convincing simplicity – his sentences read like whiskey-fueled confessions … We can’t trust ourselves because Perlman makes us care too much.’

—
Esquire

‘A sophisticated psychodrama.’

—
The Wall Street Journal

‘A brilliant book, written in the unadorned style of Raymond Carver, but with the wild metaphysical vision of a Thomas Pynchon. It is that most unusual thing – a novel that is both intellectually fun and spiritually harrowing.’

—
The Baltimore Sun

‘Worthy of Dickens or Doctorow … almost impossible to put down.’

—BookPage

‘Fast-moving, relentless but suspenseful … Perlman succeeds in illuminating the ambiguity inherent in lust, personal relationships, psychiatry and the law … Smart and edgy.’

—Booklist
, starred review

‘An all-too-rare literary page turner.’

—
Library Journal

‘Brilliant, absorbing … The scope of the novel is breathtaking but so intimately involving and densely plotted that it becomes that anomaly of a literate and urgent page-turner.’

—
The New York Post

‘One of the best novels of recent years, a complete success.’

—Le Monde
(France)

‘The scope of [Perlman’s] ambition and the strength of his achievement in portraying the psychological state of the developed world is unrivalled … We feel ourselves spiralling closer to a truth that we could not have reached through other means … from a voice in the wilderness burdened with seeing the truth.’

—
The Times Literary Supplement
(UK)

‘A colossal achievement, a complicated, driven marathon of a book … The opening section is a tour de force … At the end, in a comprehensive, an almost Shakespearian way, Perlman picks up every loose thread and knots it.’

—
The Observer
(UK)

‘My novel of the year … Captures the
Zeitgeist
of contemporary Australia every bit as powerfully as
The Corrections
anatomised that of America.’

—Jonathan Bate,
The Sunday Telegraph
(UK)

‘One of those rare works of art that makes you realise the world is both a simpler and a more complex place.’

—London Evening Standard
, a Book of the Year (UK)

‘A complex and perfectly nuanced study of idealised love turned sour.’

—Daily Mail
(UK)

‘This book’s true size is in its scope, its ambition, its emotional richness … Certainly, no novel has made this reviewer feel quite so sane in a long time.’

—
Glasgow Herald
(UK)

‘Thoroughly involving and often surprising … A triumph of the suspenseful withholding of information, and a note-perfect final page … A wise and generous book, a kind of less showy and more deeply humane version of Jonathan Franzen’s
The Corrections.’

—The Guardian
(UK)

‘Remarkable … Perlman builds up an unsettling, often sympathetic but always memorable picture of [his characters’] emotional lives, and of the coldly mercenary world they inhabit.’

—
The Sunday Times
(UK)

‘An impressive, iridescent, all-encompassing view of feeling.’

—Der Spiegel
(Germany)

‘Has the virtues of the great modern European novel.’

—Süddeutsche Zeitung
(Germany)

‘A literary sensation.’

—
Deutschlandradio
(Germany)

‘This is a deeply thoughtful, engaging, moving, exciting and utterly compelling book … It’s seven types of wonderful.’

—The Sunday Telegraph

‘Where, critics have asked, is Australia’s equivalent of Jonathan Franzen’s
The Corrections
, or Philip Roth’s
American Pastoral?
Now, with Perlman’s achingly humane, richly layered and seamlessly constructed masterpiece, it seems that we have it.’

—
The Canberra Times

‘Read it … A tour de force.’

—
The Age

‘It is a pleasure to read a book that is so intelligently engaged with our time … and [whose] characters are so convincing.’

—Australian Bookseller & Publisher

‘An elegantly constructed, wise and compassionate fable for our times, full of twists and turns and insights into the corners of human desire.’

—The Sunday Age

‘This is a novel that can make you feel you are entering the lives of the people sitting either side of you in the morning traffic … It does what novels once did but rarely can nowadays: It brings the news.’

— The Sydney Morning Herald

‘Perlman sees with painful clarity. Insights from a writer of this calibre are worth sharing.’

—
The Australian

‘Seven Types of Ambiguity
makes much Australian fiction of the past decade look wan and unambitious.’

—
Herald Sun

Praise for
The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming

‘Stunning … by turns hilarious and heartbreaking.’

—The Baltimore Sun

‘Invigorating stories … enlivened by Perlman’s intelligence, verbal energy, and mischievous wit.’

—
Entertainment Weekly

‘Unashamedly various without being feeble, a series of exercises in voice, perspective and style, it deals in violence, exile and much else besides … Deftly switching perspectives is his most impressive technique … yet Perlman’s work isn’t all juggling tricks: at times, he manages to pack whole lives into a few paragraphs … Perlman’s plots seem effortless, which makes his surprises all the more affecting.’

—The New York Times Book Review
, Editors’ Choice

‘Perlman writes fiction with muscle … It’s provocative stuff.’

—People
, Critic’s Choice

‘All of Perlman’s stories remain undeniably assured and carefully devised, and hold out nine complete and whole worlds for us to discover and contemplate.’

—
San Francisco Chronicle

‘The nine tales here don’t just suggest an emerging voice, they show it well developed, stretching and flexing … marvelously realized, evocative and utterly original … Perlman continues to amaze and move.’

—The New York Post

‘The details are perfect throughout … Perlman excels at creating tension … These stories are like walking down the hallway of an old hotel and eavesdropping on sad confessions. It’s hard not to be moved … These stories are love letters, really, and their protagonist, we come to learn, is none other than the human heart.’

—
The Washington Post

‘Fans of Perlman’s grapplings with both the minutiae and the sweeping ‘big questions’ of modern life won’t be disappointed … As a writer, Perlman’s obsession is with epic yet individual moments of truth when everything—from marriage to career to a person’s innate sense of right and wrong—seems up for grabs. Ambiguous indeed, but never less than compulsively readable.’

—
Elle

‘The nine stories serve as a varied introduction to an accomplished stylist and storyteller … Presents satisfying rewards for the discerning reader.’

—The Seattle Times

‘Impressive … Evident in all of these stories are the writer’s talent and ambition … Perlman shows he has the skills to fully manifest the ambitions, ideas, perspectives and plots for the stories he wants to tell.’

—The Miami Herald

‘Perlman has a winner with this collection of nine eloquent short stories that examine the various natures of the human condition via a cast of remarkable characters.’

—
The Sacramento Bee

‘Perlman mines pure narrative gold … insistently readable … provocative and powerful fiction from one of the best new writers on the international scene.’

—
Kirkus Reviews
, starred review

‘Coldly luminous … dead-on … Perlman in full: mystery, tight dialogue, layers of irony.’

—
Publishers Weekly

‘Readers intrigued by Perlman’s well-received
Seven Types of Ambiguity
will be delighted that he has upped the ante with nine stories whose
characters range from lawyers to immigrants … This story collection showcases the talent of young, Australian-born Perlman … expansively written with admirable control and generous detail, this is an excellent collection and is highly recommended for fiction collections.’

—Library Journal

‘Perlman’s voices draw you in and hold you … The order of the stories makes
Reasons
a sort of literary sample tray, a gradual introduction to the full breadth of Perlman’s talents. ‘A Tale in Two Cities’ [the final story in the collection] is almost worth the price of the book by itself.’

—The Boston Globe

‘Hopelessly conscious of embarrassing personal truths – the sort we realize, then yearn to forget – Perlman’s characters are erudite specialists of anomie. Hyperliterate and brutally funny, alternatively self-assured and self-loathing, they are mostly noble and deserving of our sympathy, even if we’re implicated in our schadenfreude. The effect might be depressing if Perlman didn’t show such care in imbuing his characters with devious charm … Scant evidence exists to suggest that casual flirtation with Perlman’s fiction will not end in total obsession.’

—
The Believer

Praise for
Three Dollars

‘Remarkably well-written … funny, moving, and constantly surprising … It is impossible not to care what happens to Eddie, Tanya his wife, and Abby, their adorable daughter … Perlman is echoing Auden’s cry, “We must love one another or die.’ ”

—
Time Out
(UK)

‘Constructed like a catchy pop song … a quirky cautionary tale that feels like a wake-up call …’

—
The New York Times Book Review

‘Perlman moves deftly from the personal to the political, from intellectual debate to near farce to edgy tenderness. His novel gradually builds into a study of a whole generation, a sad, angry, disconcertingly funny reflection of the way we live now.’

—
The Times Literary Supplement
(UK)

‘Funny and dramatic, literary yet accessible … what a find this is!’

—Marie Claire
(Australia)

‘[The novel’s] blend of self-deprecating wit, caustic social comment, spirited sensitivity and big heart carries the narrative in beautifully controlled passages that brim with insight, humor and feeling … Rich with the pleasures and pains of love, family, friendship and marriage … Perlman’s sheer storytelling virtuosity gives this essentially domestic tale the narrative drive of a thriller and the unforgettable radiance of a novel that accurately reflects essential human values.’

—Publishers Weekly
, starred review

‘Perlman is a marvellous storyteller.’

—
Observer
(UK)

‘Few novels ever dare to fuse emotional and economic life with the passionate intelligence of this one.’

—
The Independent
(UK)

‘The intensely appealing hero of Perlman’s debut novel is one of those troubled souls … hopelessly crushed by corporate imperatives and the all consuming arguments that develop whenever we choose to live with another person … Perlman employs both humor and compassion for all of his characters and captures the pain of inevitable adulthood with such startling accuracy that it brings tears to the eyes.’

—Book Magazine
(US)

‘Elliot Perlman’s new novel is priceless … With admirable subtlety, Perlman satirizes a world in which suburban paradise and homelessness are just a single missed payment apart.’