SOURCE: Phillips, Caryl. “The Guyana Enigma.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5040 (5 November 1999): 26.

In the following review, Phillips offers a positive assessment of Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, praising the selections for elucidating the difficulties of Harris's fiction.

In a 1975 review of Wilson Harris's novel Companions of the Day and Night, the Financial Times critic, while noting that it “reads like a poem rather than a novel,” concluded his otherwise favourable notice with the following sentence: “It seems to me to be outstanding in fiction in the past 25 years: Asturias obtained the Nobel Prize for writing just such strange works. Harris is in such a class.” The comparison with the late Miguel Ángel Asturias is an interesting one, for, like Wilson Harris, the Guatemalan novelist and poet was understood to be a “difficult” writer. However, in the Spanish-speaking tradition, Asturias has many peers: Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia...