Mark Oppenheimer writes in the Forward about The Ministry of Special Cases:
“The Ministry of Special Cases” is a provocative novel, deeply concerned with ideas, and it makes smooth use of history without feeling like a “historical novel,” the business flier’s best friend. It does not end happily, but it ends well. This novel does, however, lack the unique species of strangeness that makes Englander’s short stories unforgettable. “The Wig,” for example, feels otherworldly not because the wigs are made by an Orthodox Jewess, but because wigs are just plain creepy, the way mannequins are creepy. They both pretend to be alive. In “The Ministry of Special Cases,” the strangeness has become a kind of fantastic otherworldliness — a man named Kaddish, a long-gone race of Jewish criminals with strange names — but is inscribed a bit clumsily in the too-real world of Argentina’s Dirty War.
That clash of the real and surreal is intentional, of course, and it’s probably a fair portrayal of how it feels to live under a merciless government. But rather than being two strands always together, each inescapable, the moods tend to alternate so that one passage might be lyrical and dreamy, while another, brutal and hard-edged, feels lifted from a different book. This unevenness kept me from feeling close to the characters, because I was never sure whether they’re meant to be individuals or icons, like Kafka’s Josef K., who is a powerful symbol but a symbol nonetheless.
