A moody lament for a vanished past, present, and future that grates subtly on the nerves and lingers uncomfortably in the...
An ex-policeman turned private detective finds himself unable to forget a former client who murdered her unfaithful husband.
This intricate and absorbing seventh novel from the Booker-winning British author (Last Orders, 1996, etc.) is constructed “like one of those sequences of film played backwards, so the victim who’s been struck down seems to leap towards the blow.” That metaphoric film is the narrative that assembles itself in the mind and memory of protagonist George Webb. We first meet Webb on the anniversary of the day when language teacher Sarah Nash killed her husband Bob, a successful gynaecologist [sic] who had just ended his affair with Kristina Lazic, the Croatian refugee who had been Sarah’s pupil and their houseguest, and was returning to her formerly embattled homeland. The tricky narrative circles around the day of that murder, which is juxtaposed against related occasions and memories: the day Webb’s wife Rachel left him, following his dismissal from the force for assaulting a suspect and botching a probable conviction; Sarah Nash’s first meeting with the p.i. Webb and his instant attraction to her; the day at the golf course during Webb’s youth when he discovered his own father’s adultery; and the present day, when Webb observes the rituals of bringing flowers to Bob Nash’s grave, and visiting the prison where Sarah waits, another ghost from his past that he’s unable to embrace. The story is a triumph of tone: its slowly accreting portrayal of a life unraveling with agonizing slowness, haunted by infidelity, secrecy, and guilt, gathers great emotional power. It is, however, intermittently redundant and sluggish, and the potentially rich character of Sarah is (deliberately, we understand) never brought fully into focus. Nevertheless, The Light of Day is an elegant and gripping text: a virtuoso fusion of noir-drenched mystery and psychological analysis reminiscent of similar recent works by Kazuo Ishiguro and Paul Auster.
A moody lament for a vanished past, present, and future that grates subtly on the nerves and lingers uncomfortably in the memory.Pub Date: May 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41549-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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