“At the end of this immensely clever and tautly composed novel, the admiring reader may be left with a corresponding shadow of a doubt. Is Port Mungo a seriously meant meditation on the shadowy wellsprings of art and love, its carefully contrasted characters embodying the fraught polarities of this radioactive field? Or is it, rather, a cunningly contrived device of smoke and mirrors, with secrets passing for mysteries, and gothic conventions—doubles, ghosts and family curses (the ‘curse of the Rathbones’ is invoked for good measure)—smuggled in for added frissons? Well, as Eduardo might say, that's art. For what is art, finally, if not a contrivance in which one is gradually brought to believe?”

Christopher Benfey (The New York Times)

A 2004 Vacation Reading (selected by The New York Times)
“This immensely clever, tautly composed novel concerns a Gauguinistic artist who flees the suffocating confines of London for New York, then Havana, then Port Mungo, at the end of world and mind, where his genius flourishes. Unless it doesn't, since we learn that the narrator of all this is quite unreliable and full of hidden purpose.”