What he Learned from the Servants

Abstract

Like the best of Dickens's novels, A World for Julíus is a great, fat book that completely engages a reader with its characters and places -so completely that one reads with that often forgotten childhood pleasure of entering an all-encompassing, almost fairy-tale country of the imagination. One reads slowly, hoping the story will never end. Yet the novel is as complexas it is broad. In its disregard of the «proper» role of an author and of the «rules» of point of view, in its use of stream-of-consciousness narration, it is unabashedly and successfully post-modern. But Mr. Bryce Echenique understands that the techniques he has employed are merely tools, that a novelist' s first and last task is to move and delight.