Reviewed by Christopher Fletcher

I read João Gilberto Noll’s two novels The Quiet Creature on the Corner and Atlantic Hotel in swift succession on a rainy afternoon, a reading punctuated with the heavy sound of the light rail moving alongside. I finished one and immediately started the other, reading until it was time to move on. For weeks after, I rued that marathon reading session as I tried to disentangle the plots in my mind. Atlantic Hotel featured a narrator nearing middle-age trundling from room to room in search of himself. Quiet Creature featured a young narrator being bundled from place to place as he waits to come into his own. Or was it the other way around?