Messud returns (When the World Was Steady, 1995; not reviewed) capably indeed, with an intelligent coming-of-ager about a teenaged girl half-American and half—Algerian-French. Sagesse LaBasse is 16 in 1991, and here she tells what took place in her life in that crucial girlhood year and in the three or so years before it: and in doing so also limns a painful span in French history, from colonial days in Africa through the battle of Algiers—and on to the psychic tolls taken on those who became no longer Algerian and not quite French either. Sagesse’s grandfather fled Algiers before the collapse, having invested already in land on a semi-barren spot on the Riviera. There he relocated his family, built a hotel, and saw it flourish just as he had foreseen, along with the growing tourist industry. He had always been a rigidly domineering man, however, and success only fed his bitterness at “exile,” his increasingly rightist demand for what he thought of as social dignity, decorum, and, above all, civic respect and order. So it is that one night when Sagesse’s friends are using the hotel pool and making a great deal of modern, disrespectful teenage noise, her grandfather—well, he shoots at them. Wounding a girl, he ends up in court, goes to jail for six months—and thus exposes the psychic-emotional crack in the LaBasse family that will break it up for good. When that happens, Sagesse will describe it just as bravely and vividly as she does everything else—her own trials through adolescence; her American mother’s strange and pale varieties of weakness; the probable feelings of her profoundly retarded brother Etienne (and her own for him); her father’s boyhood, maturation, marriage—and finally his utter, wracking, ruinous calamity. A broad canvas, unflinching and clear eye for the truth, and a family tale that never fails to compel and that reverberates universally, as a fine saga should.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-100471-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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