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The
Impossibly
Reviews
Firecracker Alternative Book Award Shortlist
The Believer:
"Hunt is an intellect and a great spinner of claustrophobic noir plots, and his erudite gumshoe yarn owes as much to George Perec and Gertrude Stein as it does to Paul Auster."
Time Out New York:
"Every once in a long while, you discover a novel unlike anything else you've ever read. Laird Hunt's debut is one of them. Innovative, comic, bizarre and beautiful, The Impossibly reads as if Donald Barthelme were channeling Alain Robbe-Grillet, Samuel Beckett, Ben Marcus and reruns of Get Smart."
Minneapolis Star Tribune:
"For 200 pages, Hunt sustains an atmosphere of severe disorientation, packing his story with more curious and vaguely menacing strangers than a David Lynch movie. . . . The book's many layers and difficult questions make it an ideal candidate for an adventurous book club."
St. Petersburg Times:
"This first novel of paranoia and, in an odd way, yearning, also is probably one of the funniest and strangest books I've read in a long while."
The Capital Times, Madison, WI:
"In form and tone, The Impossibly resembles Jonathan Lethem's recent mystery novel, Motherless Brooklyn, in which the story was told from the point of view of a sleuth suffering from Tourette's syndrome."
Review of Contemporary Fiction:
"The Impossibly is one of the most exciting debut novels I have ever read. . . . While most Kafka comparisons are specious and overstated, Hunt's subtle humor, sophisticated intelligence and the graceful timbre of his prose place this novel firmly in the tradition of The Castle, as well as Nabokov's The Eye and Thomas Bernhard's The Loser. This is high praise indeed, but The Impossibly is a marvelous, wonderful novel."
Publishers Weekly:
"[Laird Hunt] captures the tone of Paul Auster's City of Glass in the first few chapters, and he brings a decidedly Kafkaesque feel to the spy's early adventures."
Kirkus Reviews:
"Hunt debuts with a stylish, if opaque, noir tale about a hit man who falls in love, takes a break, and incurs the wrath of his organization. . . . The mystery runs at all levels here, and the style and situation have appeal."
Rain Taxi Review of Books:
"The Impossibly, Laird Hunt's first novel, is a challenging and inventive work, alternately chilling and humorous, that breaks new ground in the world of speculative fiction. Diffuse with noir tropes stripped of their origins, it leaves the reader with a map of the complicit mind trying to deal with perversity and adversity in a violent world."
American Book Review:
"From the title to the last, dreamlike passage, Hunt's novel is a deliberate, sometimes striking conundrum, one with its origins deep in the heart of traditional genres (in particular, hardboiled detective fiction and international spy thrillers), but with ambitions that extend into knotty problems of narrative, language, and meaning."
Metro, Silicon Valley Weekly:
"Here, in Hunt's beautiful, curling sentences, one feels that an answer—perhaps armed—may lurk just around the corner."
City Pages, Minneapolis, MN:
"Recalling the paranoia of Thomas Pynchon, this innovative spy thriller whisks the reader into a world of amnesia and suspense, where events unfold according to the logic of a dream. Hunt's frequent touches of deadpan humor make this a noir book of laughter and forgetting."
Exquisite Corpse:
"The prose shivers with wonderment and unearths a strange magic hidden in the familiar. The reader is guided through a seeming dreamscape that just happens to be the world, and is carried along by a taut sense of imminence throughout…. Jorge Luis Borges once told an interviewer that a writer 'should be judged by the enjoyment he gives.' The abundance of pleasure in reading The Impossibly will have people waiting anxiously."
Hyde Park Review of Books:
"The Impossibly is not only a harbinger of good things to come, The Impossibly is a splendid first novel."
Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley:
"The reader becomes an active player in the storyline, attempting to decipher who is saying what to whom, deciding if the narrator is speaking or using inner monologue, and determining what is reality and what is the narrator's fantasy. If you're into spy novels and feel as though you are experienced enough to take on the challenge, Laird Hunt's The Impossibly is a mission for you."
Fodder, Ruminator Bookstore newsletter:
"Employing a darkly comic tone with a noirish edge, Hunt invites the reader to attempt to unravel the mystery of his book alongside his unique protagonist, whose occasional blunders may have unforeseen and dire consequences."
Ammiel Alcalay:
"At times poignant and acerbic, The Impossibly almost reads like a commentary on Flann O'Brien's classic The Third Policeman. As opposed to so much disposable fiction so shamelessly promoted these days, Laird Hunt is clearly a writer who has undergone a long apprenticeship in the intricate art of actually making sentences. The care and delight he takes in every word, from pronoun to article, definite or indefinite, offers the reader a rare and precise pleasure."
Brian Evenson:
"Simultaneously a compellingly elusive roman noir and an eccentric meditation on the nature of perception, The Impossibly reads like it was written by the bastard child of Dashiel Hammett and a distracted but brilliant professor of abstract mathematics. The Impossibly is a stylish and heady novel, which takes the philosophical detective story onto entirely new, and delightfully unstable, ground. It is one of the few good things to happen to the genre's development in America since Paul Auster's New York Trilogy."
Thalia Field:
"Storytelling's greatest seductions are here: paradox and shadow, spotlight and grace; The Impossibly pulls the reader into an outrageous timeless standoff between genre and its objects."
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