[1] Sollers commented that the book reflects his interest in the "unprecedented period of flux or mutation" of Western culture: [M]y work on Paradis concentrates on that point.

[6]Clark goes on to cite Paradis as an example of an encyclopedic tendency in literature, comparing it to Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Pound's Cantos: The dominance of the encyclopaedic gesture in Finnegans Wake, Paradis and the Cantos allows us to account for the characteristic length, obscurity and "bookishness" of these works; they absorb the traits and tensions of essay, Menippean satire and epic while yet exceeding these traits in their fictional translation of the encyclopaedic paradoxes noted above.

[2]Critics Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester note that in Paradis, "Sollers achieved a tour de force of modernist poetics whose clear precedents are Joyce and Faulkner.

The powerful narrative voice that emerges in these works foregrounds song, chant, psalmody, and real rhythms that point toward their sources in sacred texts and Dantean epos.

"[7] Roland Champagne, in his monograph on Philippe Sollers, writes that The humor of Paradis is found in its game of messages embedded in apparently unrelated sequences of spoken text.

[9]Paradis has not been translated into English in its entirety, although an English-language excerpt was published in an issue of TriQuarterly devoted to works that reflect the influence of Joyce's Finnegans Wake.