Here you have three fascinating stories bound together. You have the novelised, or very nearly televisualised, life of Sigmund Freud. You have a Broadway musical about the visit of Leon Trotsky to New York in 1917. And, some way into the future, you have the crushing of the planet Earth by a heavyweight intruder from a distant galaxy. . . . These three stories are all the same story: they are all about the end of history as man has known it." So says Burgess in his cheery blurb here. But, while those three separate novelettes are indeed chopped up and offered in alternating chunks throughout, they don't coalesce thematically (even if Burgess sees Freud, socialism, and outer-space as the century's Big Three items); nor does the revolving focus really achieve what Burgess calls a "new way of reading"—changing channels, as on TV. And readers will probably wind up sampling this Burgess bagatelle (if at all) by choosing one of the storylines and following it through, skipping over the other two. The Freud bio is best; it's partly a parody of the Irving Stone/TV-movie approach to pop-biography, beginning with the dying Freud leaving Vienna and then moving into the usual flashbacks (" 'I'm sick of you and your dreams,' Martha said, pouring coffee. 'If it's not one thing it's another. First it's Oedipus. Now it's dreams' "); but it's impressive, too, as it eruditely packs virtually every highlight of stormy psychoanalytic history into tiny vignettes (Adler, Jung, Ferenczi, Anna); and it manages to convey a hint of Freud-as-genuine-tragic-hero—while also leaping into the fanciful (Freud and Jung playing free-association games, Freud conversing with his cancer). The science-fiction novella is so-so: world's-end is nigh as a planet called Lynx is on collision course with future Earth; an elite handful is selected for spaceship survival, including ouranologist Vanessa Frame but not including her sci-fi-writer husband Valentine; the focus shifts back and forth between the doomed Earthlings and: the pre-flight spaceship (where tyranny and mutiny simmer); so there's an uprising at the end, with some of the good guys taking over the ship. And the Trotsky musical? Well, it's pretty dull, silly stuff—Trotsky falling in love, being tempted by capitalism—especially since the heavily-rhymed song lyrics are far too ambitious to be read as parody. A minor-Burgess potpourri, then—with occasional fun, lots of talent on indiscriminate display. . . and, despite the author's assurances ("This book is very deep"), considerably less than meets the eye.
Pub Date: March 21, 1983
ISBN: 0070089655
Page Count: 408
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1983
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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