A painful, powerful work.
This unsettling tale concerns the persecution of one man in pre–World War II Germany.
Herr Veilchenfeld, a philosopher in his 60s, comes to a small town after apparently having been forced to leave his university position. He finds that “instead of talking to him, people hurry by him silently.” Someone breaks a window in a home he’s visiting. Young men beat him up on the street, then take him to a group of older men who shave his head. Someone pees in the milk bottle delivered to his door. Another group invades his home and trashes his library. When he tries to move elsewhere, the town bureaucracy ties up his paperwork and finally shreds his passport, declaring him a noncitizen. Hofmann never explicitly says why all this is happening. But he was a German writer (1931-1993) for whom some history is inescapable, even for a book first published in 1986, 50 years after Veilchenfeld arrived in the town, even when the crime is not mass slaughter but the slow destruction of one person over three years. Hofmann never uses the words Jew, Nazi, Hitler, or brownshirt, as noted in the introduction by his son, the poet and translator Michael Hofmann. The full name of Bernhard Israel Veilchenfeld comes only on Page 51 and the last year of the action, 1938, on Page 99. Hofmann tells his story through the voice of a boy who has no sense of what he’s witnessing. The author surrounds his philosopher with mostly nondescript townspeople who abet, approve, or only quietly, and rarely, censure. Veilchenfeld exists and suffers in nearly total isolation—as a man in a small town, as a human in history. The author’s notions of complicity aren’t original, but they have an unusual force in his understated style and its clear translation, as does the implicit suggestion that the reader take a moment to multiply this victim by millions.
A painful, powerful work.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781681377582
Page Count: 176
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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