Set in Trinidad during the 1950s, this dense, often convoluted novel loosely intertwines the stories of two women, each trapped in a loveless, degrading marriage. When the body of a white woman probably killed by her husband washes up on the shore of a beach in Otahiti, it sets off ripples of shock that affect all the villagers. Rosa, daughter of an English plantation family, has fantasies of killing her own spouse, Cedric, a black schoolteacher who abuses her emotionally and sexually. Similar fantasies inspire Zuela, who must protect her 10 children from the cruelty of their opium-addicted Chinese merchant father. Zuela and Rosa were friends as children, but when they saw a man forcing sex upon a young girl, the shame and horror of what they witnessed created a rift between them. Chance brings them together again, but their destinies work themselves out quite differently. When Cedric develops stomach cancer, Rosa is filled with guilt and turns to her black former nurse, who provides a cure and helps Rosa find the strength to leave her awful marriage. But it is not Rosa's fate to be saved, even after all the penance and rhetoric of self-discovery (which sounds curiously contemporary). Zuela fares better: When she learns that her husband has raped their daughter, she finds the singleness of purpose to break the shackles that bind her to him. Nunez (When Rocks Dance, 1986) has written an ambitious book that is most successful in its portrayal of a particular culture, time, and place. She is less successful in making Rosa's and Zuela's story lines reflect and intersect with each other; the connections feel forced and contrived, and the symbolism of the final chapters is pretty heavy-handed. Lovely in parts, but finally spoiled by its excesses of language, plot, and metaphor.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56743-065-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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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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
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