Cooney (A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies, 2005, etc.) explores how war causes not just injury to the body but more...
Set in war-torn Italy in 1943, this novel looks at the peripatetic ramblings of a woman in search of her son.
Lucia Fantini is an opera singer—not a professional but still an expert—who until the war had entertained the clientele at her husband Aldo’s trattoria. Now her husband is dead, the waiters and chefs have dispersed and her son Beppi has gone into hiding after having exploded a German truck. Lucia finds herself in an almost unrecognizable landscape at the nexus of competing historical forces, for Italy has been assailed by the Nazis, the Americans have recently landed and Mussolini’s Blackshirts seemingly lurk around every corner. Still, with the sanguine expectation of ultimate success, Lucia starts off in search of her son. Along the way we learn of her treasured nights as a singer at the restaurant, taking customer and staff requests for arias from Puccini, Rossini, Verdi and Mozart. These lovingly presented flashbacks summon up a lyrical world that has almost been lost except to memory. Lucia links up with Annmarie, a woman who works for American Army Intelligence and whose prior career as a golfer leads Lucia to some surprising discoveries about Annmarie’s strengths. We also meet or hear about some of the eccentric and temperamental workers at Aldo and Lucia’s restaurant, most notably Tito, a butcher who patiently taught his dogs to pee on the boots of the local Fascists, and Ugo, a kind physician and longtime family friend who begins to turn friendship with Lucia toward romance. In one touching scene, Lucia makes a list of things “soft inside, hard outside.” These include “a scallop, a lobster, a crab, a head in a helmet…food in a can,” but ultimately, and tenderly, “a declaration of love in a war.”
Cooney (A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies, 2005, etc.) explores how war causes not just injury to the body but more importantly explains how every participant can be “injured in his nerves, in his self, in his soul.”Pub Date: April 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42496-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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
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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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