A small but rich little instant classic, as though Joseph Conrad had sent up a perfect new tale from the silence beyond the...
Manguel (News from a Foreign Country Came, 1990; the nonfiction A History of Reading, 1995; etc.) offers a tiny but deft and quietly moving story of Robert Louis Stevenson at his premature death.
Stevenson’s health brought him first to America and then to Samoa, but he was still to die at the age of 44, in 1894. Here, we follow him through the last weeks of his life, beginning one evening when he goes down to the beach to see the sunset and finds someone else there, a rather sullen fellow-Scot named Baker. Stevenson is pleased to hear an Edinburgh accent, but not to learn that Baker is on the island as a missionary, that he virulently disapproves of fiction, and that he disdains the natives for their heathenism and depravity—especially for their nudity, which Stevenson—and perhaps even his American wife—has come to accept and value for the simple beauty that it is. Baker, though, is the serpent in Eden. He disappears for certain periods and then turns up again, while Stevenson goes through spells of racking fever and cough, then periods of inexplicably hale respite. At a festival in the town, his eye is caught by an especially lovely young girl, one of a dancing group—and in his mind she remains, even as he suffers through another especially grim period time of illness. When this same girl is found murdered, her father suspects Stevenson—even his brimmed hat was found at the scene. Impossible. The reader knows—from page one—that Baker wears a hat “not unlike Stevenson’s own.” But we’ll never know the truth: Baker disappears and Stevenson dies, suddenly and pathetically. And we’ll never know what was in the story the author wrote, furiously and at the height of his fever—because he burned it immediately upon his wife’s saying, aghast after reading it, “This is poison.”
A small but rich little instant classic, as though Joseph Conrad had sent up a perfect new tale from the silence beyond the grave.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-84195-588-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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