A richly textured and deeply felt tale of life and tragedy turned into art.
A graduate student descends into madness while contemplating the relationship between the celebrated novelist James Joyce and his daughter in this labyrinthine literary mystery.
Lombardi’s novel centers on a woman who lands in a Baltimore mental hospital in 1993, where she responds to questions with enigmatic quotations from Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce. She is diagnosed with schizophrenia and identified as Molly O’Donnell, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University—hence the compulsive literary allusions—and the daughter of deceased Joyce scholar Will O’Donnell. Family, friends, and staffers try to coax her out of her psychosis but with little success. When she’s not in a medicated stupor, she’s acting out by starting fires or trying to seduce a male nurse. Interspersed with Molly’s travails in the psych ward are diary entries she wrote before her psychotic break. These cover her affairs with a married professor and a concert violinist; her vexed relationships with her alcoholic mother, domineering brother, and fragile sister; and her dissertation on the similarities between Joyce’s famously incoherent novel Finnegans Wake and the language used by schizophrenics. Her research zeroes in on Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, a schizophrenic whose symptoms mirror those Molly will display in the hospital. She theorizes that the woman’s disjointed utterances inspired Finnegans Wake and starts seeing apparitions of a derelict Lucia. Molly eventually plunges into sinister conjectures about Joyce’s relationship with his daughter, which start to color her memories of Will. Lombardi’s sprawling novel is an intense, well-observed portrait of a psychiatric patient and the obsessions that slowly undermine her sanity; an engrossing picture of literary sleuthing; a cri de coeur against intimate predations; and a moving depiction of a family torn by ugly secrets. The author’s prose has a vivid immediacy, whether she’s registering intense emotion—“How can you breathe when your lungs keep collapsing on you, like the emphysema of some five-pack-a-day smoker?” wonders Molly after a lover blithely dumps her—or a reflective lyricism. (A patient “walked alongside Molly, speaking softly to her; as they passed under the weeping willow trees Molly’s face was childlike, upturned, her slow movements for once acquiring something resembling grace.”) The result is a very Joycean exploration of a troubled psyche revealed in evocative prose.
A richly textured and deeply felt tale of life and tragedy turned into art.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2022
ISBN: 9781736244470
Page Count: 508
Publisher: Mumblers Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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