An eye-popping historical curiosity plumbing the depths of domestic dysfunction.
Rage, abuse, and suffering characterize three generations of a Russian family.
Born in 1819, herself the child of neglectful parents, Panaeva was 27 when she wrote this novel, which was suppressed by the censor for its cynicism and “undermining of parental power.” It was published under a pseudonym in a limited edition in 1848, and Panaeva went on to write numerous works of fiction and a memoir. She died in 1893. The novel was finally published under her own name in 1927 and joined what the book’s introduction calls the “canon of domestic violence fiction.” Short, breathless, tinged with humor, the bookis a horror show, a litany of cruelty, anger, and violence inflicted primarily, but not exclusively, on the eight children of a large, turbulent Saint Petersburg family. The father keeps “the same malicious calm whether he was plunging a fork into the dog’s back or throwing a plate at his wife.” The wife seems devoid of any shred of sympathy or love for her offspring, especially her daughters, as they endure beatings and starvations. Yet the narrator, Natasha, regards herself as happy and free until the age of 10. Then things go from bad to even worse, after a sadistic governess is hired and given complete control over her victims. When she finally leaves, the children are scattered among different households and teachers, one to a brute whose physical torment is pure torture. Even changes of scene—with their kindly grandmother, or on a summer trip to a seaside dacha—rarely offer much respite from conflict and shame. As the children grow up, two marry and escape, but tragedy befalls another. The bizarre, comfortless mood of Panaeva’s parable hangs in the air as a farewell is bid to “the house where I had shed so many tears.”
An eye-popping historical curiosity plumbing the depths of domestic dysfunction.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9780231213196
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An engaging, eloquent message for this fragile planet.
A story of friendship, technology, oceans, and a small island.
Powers juggled nine lead characters in The Overstory (2018), his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Here he wrangles just four, but the result is almost as complicated. Two nerdish boys, Rafi Young and Todd Keane, bond in high school over chess and Go. In college, Rafi falls in love with Ina Aroita, a Hawaii-born Navy brat whose mother is Tahitian. The men fall out shortly after brainstorming over Todd’s idea for a computer game called Playground. This strand of the novel is told in retrospect by Todd at age 57, addressing an unidentified “you,” after he receives a diagnosis of dementia with Lewy bodies; he’s an unreliable narrator in more than one way. Interspersed are scenes in later years on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, scarred by phosphate mining and down to a population of 82, including Rafi and Ina and the novel’s fourth lead, an elderly Canadian scuba diver named Evelyne Beaulieu. Her lifelong love of the diversity and preciousness of aquatic life provides the book’s other narrative strand and its environmental theme. Through Todd, Powers sketches the computer and social media revolutions, from early coding to gaming to AI. The counterpoint to this high-tech history is Makatea, a paradise lost to industrial mining that decades later must decide whether to accept a consortium’s lucrative proposal to use the island to build floating autonomous cities. This is a challenging novel, fragmented but compelling, with fine writing on friendship and its loss and on the awe and delight the ocean inspires. Along with its environmental warnings, the book carries an intriguing look at the ways people and animals play, as in the boys’ competitive chess, the antics of manta rays, the allure of computer games, and what a meta-minded author might do with his readers.
An engaging, eloquent message for this fragile planet.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781324086031
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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