Dunmore (With Your Crooked Heart, 2000, etc.) has a gift for telling her tale in the rhythm of war and suffering, but less...
A small knot of people fight to survive the Nazi siege of Leningrad in a book that feels more like history than it does like a novel.
In the summer of 1941, twenty-two-year-old Anna Levin is staying with her father, Mikhail, at his small dacha outside Leningrad, where Anna keeps watch over her five-year-old brother Kolya. Mikhail is a writer whose lack of political acuity has made him unpublishable; and this failure, along with the recent loss of his wife, has made him into a premature invalid. Anna doesn’t have much drive, either. She watches after the family, does some drawing, takes care of the garden, and, like everyone else, makes sure to voice politically correct enthusiasms for Comrade Stalin so that the men in black vans won’t show up in the middle of the night to take them away. Then, she hears the unbelievable news of a German assault on Russia, and the story begins its lockstep march from the tensions of peacetime to the horrors of war. Despite everyone’s protestations that the Fascists will never get anywhere near Leningrad, the nearer they come. Anna and her family move into the city so as not to be cut off. They are joined in their small apartment by Marina, an actress who fell from political grace years ago and was also a mistress of Mikhail’s; and Andrei, a young doctor who quickly falls for Anna. As the temperature drops, so does hope. The brutal winter makes an already-unbearable situation worse, and soon people are making soup out of bread and water and praying for an end to winter.
Dunmore (With Your Crooked Heart, 2000, etc.) has a gift for telling her tale in the rhythm of war and suffering, but less of one for releasing the springs of a novel. Still, mixing an easy lyricism with gruesome honesty, she shows us what life is like for civilians in war—praying for help, saving the last crust of bread.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1700-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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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