A subtle, thoughtful portrait of a woman chafing at the demands and constraints of domestic life.
Consumed by the minutiae of caring for a family, a Tokyo housewife ekes out a perfectly ordinary but profoundly unfulfilling existence.
Newly translated by Barton, this brief but piercing stream-of-consciousness novel manages to feel topical more than 25 years after it was published in Japan in 1997. Its eight chapters and 190-odd pages are linked not so much by plot as by tone and theme. Thirty-something wife and mother Natsumi spends her days doing chores, running errands, gossiping with neighbors, and tending to her husband and their two young sons, all the while fighting a vague, nagging sense of ennui. Natsumi resigned from her "easy-but-tedious job" after she’d had her first child and has not worked outside the home since. Her inner monologue, a vivid mishmash of memories and observations, mingles with the events of the book to provide a window into her perspective. While Natsumi acknowledges that her life is not bad per se, she is nevertheless frustrated by its monotony and mundanity. She has visited the nearby supermarket so many times that she has the layout of the store memorized. When she finds an old shopping list in a jacket pocket one day, she's “utterly sickened” to discover that it's nearly identical to the one she wrote on a memo pad moments before. “There was,” she thinks at one point, “something Sisyphean in the nature of the roster of simple domestic tasks that she had to get through day in day out, a sense that however much she did there was never any end in sight.” Laden with descriptions of objects and locations, Kanai’s detail-rich sentences offer a specificity of time and place that make the story feel grounded in reality. In portraying Natsumi’s conflicted relationship to her roles as wife, mother, and housekeeper, Kanai considers the potentially reductive effects of marriage, motherhood, and domesticity on personal identity.
A subtle, thoughtful portrait of a woman chafing at the demands and constraints of domestic life.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9780811232289
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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