SOURCE: Fodor, Jerry. “Bottoms Again.” London Review of Books 19, no. 12 (19 June 1997): 21.

In the following negative review, Fodor compares The Woman and the Ape to Will Self's Great Apes, discussing the elements of allegory and the animal imagery in each.

Archimedes thought that he could move the world if only he could get outside of it, and the same idea inspires writers in the transcendental genre of fiction. Find some place sufficiently far out and put your fulcrum there. The leverage you achieve will lend authority to your voice. Both these books hope that higher primates will supply the required pivot. The Woman and the Ape looks up to them for moral edification; Great Apes looks down on them for comic relief. Each is, in its own way, amply unsuccessful.

Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow made a stir a couple of years ago. Its plot was...