Like her characters, Ólafsdóttir’s novel is emotionally chilly while intellectually passionate.
An Icelandic midwife, from a long line of midwives, tries to decipher the meaning of the unpublished manuscripts her beloved great-aunt and mentor left in her care before dying.
The week before Christmas, Iceland braces for a storm of frightening proportions. Alone in the apartment she inherited from grandaunt Fífa, Dýja takes phone calls from her meteorologist sister about the increasingly extreme weather caused by climate change, strikes up a limited but potentially flirtatious relationship with an Australian tourist renting the apartment upstairs, and fixes up Fífa’s run-down flat with the help of a younger midwife. But rudimentary plot aside, the real focus of the book is on Dýja’s ruminations about her own and Fífa’s belief systems about life and death. Tellingly, Dýja, who gave up theology for midwifery, reveals that midwife means “mother of light” in Icelandic, and it's considered "the most beautiful word in our language"; in rather obvious contrast, her parents run a funeral home. Childless women devoted to delivering other women’s babies, Dýja and Fífa see themselves and the world around them with concrete, spare objectivity that readers may find either refreshing or off-putting. Emotions are not discussed and only rarely acknowledged. Instead, this slim novel packs in a lot of factual information, from the sex life of bonobos to the worldwide death rate of women in childbirth—830 a day! Midwifery is the subject but also the metaphor, as is Iceland itself, a nation where people value light since it’s in short supply. Dýja struggles to decide if Fífa’s three manuscripts, shared in snippets, are drafts covering a main theme from different angles or separate entities. Certainly, Fífa seems ahead of her time as she rails against man’s effect on Earth’s survival in the 20th century. Although sexual relationships are mentioned, how they fit into each woman’s life remains mysterious. Both women emphasize the noun man throughout, and it is pointedly vague whether Fífa includes women when she voices her belief that man is inferior to other animals.
Like her characters, Ólafsdóttir’s novel is emotionally chilly while intellectually passionate.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-6016-4
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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