Luminously written stories that do not quite finish telling their tales.
Qian’s debut collection navigates between New York and Los Angeles, the U.S. and China, as it follows its young Asian and Asian American women through the languid menace of youth.
In this promising collection’s opening story, “Chicken. Film. Youth,” Luna is back in her childhood city, LA, meeting up with friends who have all reached the point in their late 20s when they have “switched from wanting to get older to feeling like [they] could stand to be a little bit younger.” When the reader sees her again in “Zeroes:Ones,” she is just out of college, living in Suzhou, and working at the university language center as a tutor while she explores her complicated feelings about China as a “country both homeland and exotic.” Luna’s wanderings thread through the collection—she appears as a main character in four of the 11 stories—but the interstitial longing she feels about her Asian American identity, her sense of isolation, the aimlessness of adulthood after the driving promise of youth, and the driving question of what comes next are the guiding forces behind all the stories in this lovely but sometimes listless book. Often, the dominantly female main characters are lured into situations that fizz with menace—such as Nora in “Monitor World,” who matches with the mysterious agamemnon_the_king on a site for “lovers of the underground” only to discover that his sexual prowess hides darker, and somehow more quotidian, desires; or Emi in the title story, who runs into a childhood friend in Tokyo and shortly afterward finds herself isolated in a house on the slopes of Mount Haruna, participating in an ominous conceptual art project sponsored by the cultish Anti-Civilization Committee. Sometimes, as in the standout stories “The Girl With the Double Eyelids,” “Power and Control,” and “Seagull Village,” a world with alternative rules in which visions reveal hidden truths, alchemy is a black-market hobby, and spirits roam freely is laid over our own to reveal startling and subtle truths. More often than not, however, both the sense of threat and magic fizzle out in the face of the stifling ennui that keeps most of Qian’s characters enacting the same apathetic orbits even when they attempt radical escape.
Luminously written stories that do not quite finish telling their tales.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781953534927
Page Count: -
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
This propulsive thriller twists into the dark and bloody underbelly of the world of fine art.
The discovery that a revered artist’s sculpture contains a human bone sets off scandal and violence.
Art historian James Becker has what seems like a sweet deal. He’s the curator of the collection of the Fairburn Foundation, housed at a stately home owned by the Lennox family: Sebastian, Becker’s best friend, and his bitter mother, Lady Emmeline. Becker’s wife, Helena, was Sebastian’s fiancee first, but they’re all very civilized about it and happily awaiting the birth of her baby. The centerpiece of the Fairburn collection is works by the late Vanessa Chapman, an artist about whom Becker wrote his thesis, and with whom he is somewhat obsessed. Partly, it’s because of her great talent, but she was also a glamorous figure, a beauty who, as she became successful, sequestered herself on an isolated Scottish tidal island called Eris. She had a dark side—lots of stormy relationships, plus a philandering mooch of a husband who vanished without a trace a few decades ago. Her reputation, though, has risen after her death—so much so that the Fairburn has loaned some of her works to the Tate Modern. That’s where a forensic anthropologist sees one of her sculptures, made of found objects that include what’s described as an animal bone. The scientist is sure the bone is human, and soon Becker finds himself scrambling to prevent scandal. Vanessa willed her works and papers to the foundation, but some of them are still on Eris, guarded by her longtime friend Grace Haswell. A retired doctor, Grace lived with Vanessa off and on over the years and nursed her through her fatal cancer. It was a surprise when Vanessa left her estate not to Grace but to Douglas Lennox, Emmeline’s husband and Sebastian’s father. Douglas was Vanessa’s gallerist and lover, but the two had a nasty falling-out. Sebastian is so frustrated by Grace’s refusal to turn over all of the bequest that he’s ready to sue her, but Becker believes he can negotiate, so off to the the island he goes. He finds far more treachery and shocking secrets than he expected, past and present alike. Hawkins keeps her cast tight, her wild setting ominous, and her plot moving fast.
This propulsive thriller twists into the dark and bloody underbelly of the world of fine art.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9780063396524
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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