SOURCE: Butt, John. “Days without Love.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5014 (7 May 1999): 22.

In the following review, Butt derides Dorfman's complex and overworked language in The Nanny and the Iceberg.

This novel is neither serious nor funny. The portrayal of the anti-hero's father shows why. He is named Cristóbal and is linked to Christopher Columbus in some obscure and unimportant way. After losing his virginity on the day of Che Guevara's death, he bets some Chilean friends that he will sleep with a different woman every day for twenty-five years (no prostitutes), and he keeps it up throughout most of his son Gabriel's youth, and most of the novel too. The effect of this treadmill marathon is to inflict total impotence on Gabriel, an unattractive computer nerd brought up in the United States; the novel is about his agonizing quest to lose his virginity and reroot himself in Chile...