"So far, so very Proust, of whom Felsen was an acolyte. Witness his long, elastic sentences, and some of their favourite tricks, such as the centrifugal spin from a transient feeling to a pronouncement on humanity...Felsen's name deserves to be conjured with, just as it was before Paris fell."
—Telegraph
"This translation is a formidable achievement...reading these pages as the narrator minutely examines his own judgments has a hypnotic effect. Layer after layer is stripped from the narrator's mind until we are left with the core: amor vincit omnia."
—Literary Review
"For reasons that are evident from the first page, Felsen achieved with the publication of Deceit the reputation of a Russian Proust, an accolade reinforced by Karetnyk’s splendid, lucent translation."
—Hong Kong Review of Books