A cerebral elegy that demands patience, even from serious film lovers.
German author Kinsky’s spare, abstract fiction centers on a woman’s nostalgia for experiencing movies in a theater.
Like the iconoclastic filmmaker John Cassevetes, whom she quotes throughout, Kinsky avoids conventional plot structure and psychological probing. Her unnamed narrator spends pages describing the physical world, often as a vista of “flatness and vastness”—vastness being a favorite word—and musing about the relationship between image and memory, cinema as “vastness…bound to this physical place,” and the “communality of the cinematic experience.” Meanwhile, she reveals little about the emotional landscape of the people around her and shares only the barest details of her own story. As a child in an unnamed, probably Eastern European country (given that she studied Polish and Russian), she watches no television and only occasionally visits the cinema with her father, whose reticence is the only characteristic she mentions. As an adult, she takes photographs, but whether as a career or hobby isn’t clear. No intimate friends show up, only acquaintances. After years in London, described by the names of movie theaters she frequented, she moves to Budapest, where an elderly neighbor named Julika mentions that she once “had a fellow who was a great cinema man.” Traveling around southeast Hungary, the narrator finds a small town with an abandoned movie theater she decides to buy and restore after meeting its former projectionist and some other locals. At this point, Kinsky drops in an “interlude” telling the story of a young cinema enthusiast known as Laci who brings movies to his hometown during World War II with the help of a young woman named Julika; while their romance is half-baked and Julika eventually leaves, Laci’s lifelong obsession with cinema is passionate. The narrator takes up her own story again as she completes her restoration and attempts to reopen what had been Laci’s theater. Ultimately, sorrow bleeds through the narrator’s (and author’s) reserve, the decline of cinema epitomizing profound loss—of place, of beloved people (see the dedication at the end), of optimism.
A cerebral elegy that demands patience, even from serious film lovers.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781681378510
Page Count: 176
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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