A sharp and biting satire of the new face of Eastern Europe: a bestseller in Hungary and Germany that deserves a good run...
Second novel but first US appearance for Hungarian author Bozai: a witty tale that imagines the travails that befall a middle-aged atheist schoolteacher who finds herself crowned with a halo.
Anna Levay is one of those timid, gray souls who inhabit the faculty lounges of public schools across the globe. Thrifty (of necessity), diligent, and prudent, she is the sort of woman who allows herself the luxury of nothing but bath salts. Why? Because a colleague from the physics department once told her that the suds insulate the water and help conserve heat. The comfortable routine of her life is changed when she emerges from the tub one night to discover a nimbus of light encircling her head. After convincing herself that it is not a hallucination (which takes some time), she carefully takes the halo’s temperature (to make sure it is not hot enough to start a fire) and goes to bed. The next morning it’s still there—stranger still, no one else except babies and animals can see it. Anna tries to go about her life as usual, hoping that her delusion will eventually subside. Fat chance. A series of strange events, all somehow linked to Anna, begin to occur in her small coastal town. Fish jump out of the water and ground themselves. Unexplained healings take place in the river nearby. Anna begins involuntarily to quote long passages from the Bible in the middle of everyday conversations. The corrupt mayor (an ex-Communist turned entrepreneur) and his sidekick, a venal neurologist, are concerned. They had grandiose and lucrative plans to turn the city into a world-class tourist attraction but now find themselves swamped with a tidal influx of sick and handicapped pilgrims. Lourdes is not the kind of resort the mayor had in mind. So he and the neurologist conspire to get Anna put quietly out of the way. Will she go quietly? Never underestimate the staying power of tenured faculty.
A sharp and biting satire of the new face of Eastern Europe: a bestseller in Hungary and Germany that deserves a good run over here.Pub Date: June 28, 2004
ISBN: 1-58243-277-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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