The idea behind Ozick's short allegory is electric, arcing across the spaces between literature and salvation—but at such curt length, and so jammed, that the execution is staticky. Lars Andemening is the third-string book reviewer (the one who does "serious" books by European writers no one has much heard of) on an itself less-than-leading Stockholm daily. Divorced twice, Lars doesn't especially care about his lack of status, though; in private he has something more nourishing, i.e., the absolute conviction that he is the son of the Jewish Polish genius Bruno Schulz, tragically killed in the streets of his small Polish town by the S.S. So intent is he on seeing through his putative father's eyes that Lars has arranged to learn Polish so he can savor in the original the two extant short collections Schulz left. . .and dream in fidelity at least about the "lost" last work, The Messiah. Then one day Lars gets a message—from an old woman, a bookseller who's been his chief confidante concerning his self-assumed identity—that his sister is in Stockholm. He hates to believe that a sister even exists; and worse, when he meets the woman, she has brought along a manuscript stored in an amphora, claiming (as does the bookseller's husband, a Dr. Eklund, a shadowy expert in provenances) that it is The Messiah! Lars ultimately and violently does far worse than reject the woman and the manuscript. . .which is at about the point when a chill runs down a reader's spine: the title of the lost Schulz book in this context is no accident—and how will the imagination, when the time comes, react to real redemption? The most Jamesian of Ozick's very Master-imbued works, the novella's conceptual frame is clean, polished, and startling. Yet the actual prose is frantically busy; the dialogue is hyperbolic, tuned to an impossibly high, brassy pitch; and the allegory doesn't get enough space to insinuate, to slink in—it comes at you like a cuffing instead. Great fables, Schulz's themselves a prime example, at first wear a fake coat of innocence—yet Ozick seems not to have the patience for that: wanting the allegory to be morally indelible, it bursts toward us flood-like, and the result is smear. Challenging but twitchy work by one of our most remarkable stylists.
Pub Date: March 10, 1987
ISBN: 0394756940
Page Count: 141
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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