Many thanks to editor John Griswold for letting me come play in The McNeese Review's cool new Rec Room.
April 27, 2012, 11:50 a.m.Categories: Nonfiction, Review
Many thanks to Chris Narozny for reading (and recommending) Pacazo: “Roy Kesey’s Pacazo offers just about everything you could ever think to love in a novel: a narrator with a keen mind and a messy life; paragraphs that, structurally, move like sonnets; and a clearly delineated plot serving as a kind of mooring post for digressions that, in true Cervantean fashion, are not digressions at all but rather the real substance of the book... This is the best novel I’ve read in a long while.”
April 11, 2012, 11:41 a.m.Categories: Novels, Pacazo, Peru, Review
Many thanks to Allan Jones and Uncut Magazine for an amazing review of Pacazo in their May issue: "500 pages of mesmerisingly wrought anguish, violence and derangement reminiscent of the best of Robert Stone or Denis Johnson. (…) There's an hallucinatory quality to much of Kesey's writing, feverish connections made between Segovia's present and Peru's past, ...tenses blurred and overlapping, then and now becoming one in stunning juxtaposition."
Some great news - big ups for Pacazo from Malcolm Forbes in this weekend's Times Literary Supplement: “Pacazo is a richly capacious book... a full-blown affair which, once we sift and filter the exhaustive detail, reveals itself to be a searching study of love, loss and the corrupting and redemptive power of time.”
Twice in the past four years, Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights (Bath, England) has been named the U.K's Independent Bookseller of the Year. Also, they really like Pacazo. Coincidence? You be the judge. And many thanks to Lucinda Corby for the kind words: “This is a book of great ambition and scope - including in terms of the writing style itself.”
Many thanks to William Rycroft for his kind words for Pacazo at the great Australian arts and entertainment site, The Blurb: “...it is surprising how many times the real blows to the gut come from a single sentence or image.”
Just found out that the philosopher Jonathan Barnes had kind words for Pacazo in an article called "Five First Novels" in the February 2012 issue of Literary Review:
"Although this is the kind of story that purposefully withholds any particular closure, it is not without considerable rewards. Kesey excels at evoking the geography of the country ... and at describing its venomous wildlife.”
Many thanks to John Self: "Loosening the ties of chronology, Kesey achieves extraordinary effects by twisting time frames together, so that within the same paragraph, he can simultaneously relate the "now" of the narrative, the narrator's memories, and historical events. This is three-dimensional storytelling, enhanced repeatedly by a neat trick something like the literary equivalent of Stanley Kubrick's bone-to-space-station jump cut in 2001."
March 3, 2012, 12:06 p.m.Categories: History, Pacazo, Review
From Kate Saunders: "Roy Kesey’s book, set in the ancient city of Piura, is big, intelligent and wonderfully original."
February 11, 2012, 12:05 a.m.Categories: Novels, Pacazo, Review
From Siobhan Murphy: “A virtuoso display of putting your reader comprehensively through the wringer... This obsessive hunt for justice is utterly convincing.” Elsewhere Metro lists Pacazo as one of the Top 10 Things to Do this Week-end.
