The Huffington Post: Most Anticipated Books for the Rest of 2010

Extraordinary Renditions is one of 15 books that Anis Shivani has listed as “to look forward to from publishers at all levels for the rest of the summer and the fall.” Jonathan Franzen, Gary Shteyngart, Orhan Pamuk, and Edwidge Danticat also made the cut.

Booklist review of Extraordinary Renditions

Advanced Review – Uncorrected Proof
Issue: August 1, 2010
Extraordinary Renditions.
Ervin, Andrew (Author)
Sep 2010. 192 p. Coffee House, paperback, $14.95. (9781566892469).
Three disparate lives—of an aging, internationally renowned composer; an African American GI; and a young American violinist—intersect in contemporary Budapest in Ervin’s first novel. Lajos Harkályi returns for the first time to his native city to attend the world premiere of his new opera with his niece, Magda, a translator at a nearby U.S. Army base; PFC “Brutus” Gibson is having an affair with Magda; and Melanie Scholes has a solo in Harkályi’s opera. But each person’s story has a darker side: Harkályi is reminded of being sent to the Terezen concentration camp as a youth and narrowly escaping death, Gibson is blackmailed by his sadistic commanding officer and attacked by skinheads in the city where his race makes him stand out, and Scholes is an expat adrift in a personal relationship. Ervin’s prose style seems to fit his protagonists, becoming more elegant for Harkályi, angrier and more combative for Gibson, and more diffident for Scholes until the climax, as the theme of “Strange Fruit” grows stronger. A thoughtprovoking exploration of tyranny, freedom, and the power of music. — Michele Leber

Publisher’s Weekly “Pick of the Week” for July 19

The starred review says:

Set in a madly grasping modern Budapest, literary critic Ervin’s debut mines very different ways of achieving personal and artistic freedom in three neatly polished, interlocking tales. In “14 Bagatelles,” world-renowned Hungarian composer Harkályi Lajos, a WWII concentration camp survivor who emigrated to America at 15, returns to Budapest for the premiere of his opera, The Golden Lotus, and finds the city shockingly hostile, criminal, and deeply anti-Semitic. “Brooking the Devil” follows the plight of a young black American GI, “Brutus” Gibson, rescued from skinheads by Harkályi, who is framed by his superior officer. Set up on a dangerous gun-running mission, Gibson recognizes his two choices: submit or refuse and risk court-martial. Finally, in “The Empty Chairs,” a second violinist in the Budapest orchestra, a young American expatriate performing Harkályi’s opera on the night of the premiere, deviates wildly from the score in a surprising and transformative reaction to the work–to the conductor’s horror and the composer’s great delight. With dexterous sensibility and fluid prose, Ervin’s protagonists find liberation from the onerous strictures of Budapest’s Nazi and Communist past. (Sept.)