Are you wishing for a wry, sly book about the human comedy? Wish granted.
Outsized egos take a shellacking in nine crafty, contemporary tales about vanity and the titular “idiots” who succumb to it.
In each of the first five stories, a fairy appears, hovering just inches above the urban German turf where, in succession, five hapless narcissists—an ad executive determined to salvage his firm; a young film director frightened of his own brilliance; a mother jealous of her famous son; a hack writer disgusted by his commercial success; an alcoholic know-it-all desperate for recognition—bemoan their plights and are in turn offered the granting of one wish. Although the fairies vary from tale to tale (several are cranky, another is a newbie recently promoted from shooting-star service), they all stick to the rules: one wish only, no wishing for more than one wish, while wishes for immortality, health, money and love are verboten. It’s a thankless job. Each grantee quibbles with the rules (denied immortality, the director asks for at least 200 years), dismisses the fairies’ suggestions (insulted by the offer of a dishwasher, the mother says she ran a left-wing record store for 28 years and washed dishes by hand all her life), misunderstands what the fairies are offering (the alcoholic asks for four Alka-Seltzers) and inevitably wishes for something that yields un-wished-for consequences. The conceit works, but the four closing stories are even better. In these, German novelist Arjouni (Magic Hoffman, 2000, etc.) shifts his creative talents and humor into overdrive, with results as smooth as an S-Class Mercedes on the Autobahn, as when a wannabe novelist, by recounting his plot, winds up lulling to sleep a bank robber who’s holding him hostage at gunpoint; or when a famous director pays a hitchhiker to pose as his long-lost writer-friend at a party, where, when another guest inquires what genre he writes, the imposter responds, “Holy Scripture.”
Are you wishing for a wry, sly book about the human comedy? Wish granted.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59051-157-3
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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