Funny, humane, and sympathetic to the silly creatures we humans are. The Dalai Lama himself would probably approve.
Ever goofy, ever surreal French novelist Volodine (Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, 2015, etc.) rewrites the rules of Tibetan Buddhism, using characters that might have been drafted from the second string of Waiting for Godot.
Bardo, as Laurie Anderson’s recent film Heart of a Dog reminds us, is a kind of limbo where the dead await reincarnation for seven weeks, a place where nothing much happens while the soul gathers its wits and chooses its next earthly vehicle. Volodine turns this on its head: plenty happens, even if the departed can’t quite suss it out. “The Bardo,” says one Babloïev by way of helpful explanation to the recently dead Glouchenko. “The intermediary world. We’re going to float and walk around here for forty-nine days.” Unimpressed, Glouchenko, apparently a devotee of slang, replies, “Cut the crap. You’re barking up the wrong tree if you think you can just jerk me around.” It turns out, as another intermediary, Mario Schmunk, notes, that poor Glouchenko has been dead for four weeks and, thick as he is, still hasn’t gotten around to realizing it, prompting a mysterious voice to cut through the fog: “It is high time that you liberate yourself, Glouchenko! Make an effort, Glouchenko!” Glouchenko is not an effortful fellow, though, which may just get him reborn as a monkey. Neither are some of the other denizens of the Bardo, some of whom take Bardo as an excuse to have a nice nap. In this vignette-layered novel, Volodine explores a fruitful premise throughout, namely, that if some of our lives are thoughtlessly lived and some of our deaths downright embarrassing, why should not death be thoughtless and shameface-making? Just ask Big Grümscher and Little Blumschi, “the kings of laughter,” clowns who aren’t laughing so much now that the monks are shouting out sutras from the Book of the Dead….
Funny, humane, and sympathetic to the silly creatures we humans are. The Dalai Lama himself would probably approve.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940953-33-5
Page Count: 165
Publisher: Open Letter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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