Fiction about the essence of fiction challenges the reader to distinguish between what’s allegory and what’s arbitrary.
This novel in the guise of a travel guide might intrigue literary theorists but will likely exasperate readers looking for plot, character, motivation and meaning.
There was a period during the late ’60s and ’70s when college students who fancied themselves intellectuals devoured the nouveau roman (“new novel”) of Robbe-Grillet as avidly as they did the existentialism of Sartre and Camus. Even then, Ricardou remained little-known outside his native France, though this new translation of his 1969 novel shows even more of an absurdist’s sense of humor than most literary experimentalists. The prose at the outset is as descriptively flat as a travel guidebook, with the author working his way through towns that are not only organized alphabetically but geographically, and perhaps thematically as well. Along the way, the reader notices the recurrence of a prominent painter of the region, Albert Crucis, whose name (or pseudonym) translates as “white cross.” All of the place-name translations may (or may not) have significance as well, or so the reader might learn from Atta and Olivier, two Crucis scholars whose novel this becomes as it progresses. Or does it? It turns out that one or both of the scholars have already read this book, at least the preceding pages, as part of their research, and thus ponder whether they have any existence outside these pages. Later, the novel introduces a first-person “I” who not only purports to be the author, but who provides insight into the narrative (or non-narrative) strategy and predicts how the novel will be received: “The publication of this work will allow some to advance further down the path toward coherence, but from a predictable majority, I have no doubt, it will garner nothing but sarcasm and occasional threats.” The reader wondering what it all means will find himself in the position of the character with a magnifying glass monitoring the movement of ants.
Fiction about the essence of fiction challenges the reader to distinguish between what’s allegory and what’s arbitrary.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56478-478-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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