From Publishers Weekly
Sorrentino crafts this intellectual page-turner, arguably his best work to date, out of 59 independent, short, surreal tales. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
These 59 sketches--inventive elaborations of half-recalled images--combine a Joycean sensibility with the linguistic playfulness of Robert Coover. Several characters appear in more than one vignette along with recurring images that include a half-clad woman by a kitchen window, a snowman, and three women dressed in white by a dark lake. There is some discussion of signs and signifiers and their relationship to object. Sorrentino pokes fun at literary theory and critical methodology while at the same time using insights derived from such theories. His form is perfect, and his method presents the reader with a mysterious and tantalizing puzzle, yielding a haunting and powerful reading experience. Recommended for contemporary literature collections.- William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNYCopyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
From prolific Sorrentino (Misterioso, 1989, etc.), an anthology of 59 sketches (``Fire,'' ``House,'' ``Casino,'' ``Balloon,'' etc.) that are occasionally interlinked and often intriguing as a sort of post-Donald Barthelme dreamlike rendition: tantalizing, enigmatic, but finally promising more than they can deliver. A tone of wistful postmodernist loss pervades the venture: ``it seemed to sensitive and alert men and women that language had begun to collapse and then dissolve....'' This loss of language becomes a motif. In ``Fire,'' for instance, we read of ``the holocaust of books,'' while Sorrentino, using recurring characters, pops in bits of musicology, psychology, literature, etc., all to insinuate a connivance between the short dreamlike narratives and the ideal reader: ``...for each of the clues in and of itself, and for all of them in combination with certain, or all, of the others, there is always to be discovered a person who, aghast, reads in them the hidden secrets of his or her own life. In some inexplicable way, the clues point everywhere at once.'' As in a Godard movie, the real and surreal merge: in ``Moon,'' a recurring character looks through a telescope at the moon and sees erotic goings-on between a man and three young women. Are the characters real? Are they imagined by each other? This is the sort of game Kundera plays self-consciously and ploddingly but accessibly, while Sorrentino deliberately abandons plot in favor of poetry and image so that story won't interfere with the text's attempt to ``metamorphose and relocate its images, to turn its callous dialogue into metaphor: to soften it, that is, into bittersweet sadness.'' Yet another prose experiment from Sorrentino--pellucid miniatures page by page but, in its entirety, an impressionistic collage that is by turns lyrical, funny, and self-indulgent. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Under the Shadow takes the form of fifty-nine brief sketches with simple nouns as titles. These exquisite vignettes take place on a plane at once surreal, abstract, and ominous, describing a set of people and incidents derived largely from fragments of conversation and gossip gathered here and there. They remind us of Raymond Roussel's characters amid his inimitable ersatz pastorals, with tableaux both innocent and grotesque. There is something ambiguous about these passages, something deliberately closed and dreamlike. Many of them read like primal scenes of private pathologies; others are memories that, many years later, retain their power to haunt.From these fragments of memory, half-memory, and smudged images, certain scenes recur with eerie regularity: a half-clothed woman glimpsed through a kitchen window; a mysterious fire set by a maniac intent on the destruction of "official memories"; and most tantalizingly, a shifting, voyeuristic account of three young women in luminous white dresses by the shore of a dark lake. All of these events seem to have occurred years ago in an unspecified place and are already the subjects of files, case studies, even biographies. At first isolate and puzzling, these vignettes become linked to others as the book progresses; they cohere in the way images in a long poem cohere, or harmonic progressions in music, not in the sense of character- and plot-development. For Sorrentino's prose aspires to the condition of music, of painting—freeing the novel from the constraints of realism and entering the realm of pure art.

"Under the Shadow is a rare contemporary work that is wise enough to allow the reader to be a collaborator in the production of meaning rather than a consumer of another's literary mirage." (San Francisco Chronicle 4-15-92)

"A rare specimen of the genre: an intellectual page-turner." (Publishers Weekly 9-6-91)

"His form is perfect, and his method presents the reader with a mysterious and tantalizing puzzle, yielding a haunting and powerful reading experience." (Library Journal 10-15-91)

"Long after you have turned the last page, Under the Shadow goes on inhabiting your thoughts and activating your imagination. This is a virtuoso performance by our most original writer. Read it, you'll like it." (Dallas Morning News 1-19-92)

"This is a superb book by our best living fiction writer, and you should find it and read it." (Curtis White, Exquisite Corpse #35 1992)

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Sorrentino crafts this intellectual page-turner, arguably his best work to date, out of 59 independent, short, surreal tales. (Jan.)

Library Journal