Atxaga has taken in a lot about the peculiarities of desert living, but he’s only half-heartedly attempted to deliver a...
A Basque novelist takes a detour in Reno and contemplates his Spanish heritage alongside the American desert landscape.
This semiautobiographical novel by Atxaga (Seven Houses in France, 2011) opens with a writer not unlike Atxaga himself arriving with his wife and two daughters for a stint as a writer-in-residence in Reno, a magnet for Basque migrants and home to a Basque studies department at the University of Nevada. Writing in the form of a diary interspersed with longer personal essays, the narrator offers some fish-out-of-water descriptions of life in America: his kids doing active-shooter drills in school, campaign visits from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (the novel is set in 2007 and 2008), and (a particular fixation) the ignorance or blithe indifference of his neighbors to news about a serial rapist in the area. But nobody would confuse Atxaga for de Tocqueville, disinclined as he is to broad cultural analysis and prone as he is to digress. The story includes riffs on famous Basque figures like boxer Paulino Uzcudun, who trained in Nevada before a bout with Max Baer, the death of a mentally ill cousin, and a trip to Italy. From incident to incident, Atxaga’s storytelling can be engaging, shifting from highly detailed set pieces about funeral processions and typefaces to travelogues of road trips to San Francisco and through barren desert to dreamscapes (he depicts a particularly lively one involving a dumping ground for metaphors). But the novel overall is effectively plotless and hence static-feeling; despite Atxaga’s efforts to use the news stories about the rapist and disappeared adventurer Steve Fossett as a frame, the book mostly meanders.
Atxaga has taken in a lot about the peculiarities of desert living, but he’s only half-heartedly attempted to deliver a full-bodied work of fiction about it.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55597-810-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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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