A sexy but self-conscious recreation of post–World War II European malaise.
In postwar Italy, a renowned poet/translator with suicidal tendencies and an enormous sex drive enjoys a love triangle with two American actresses who happen to be sisters.
Loosely basing her fictional Dante Sabato on Cesare Pavese, whose love affair with an American expat actress ended shortly before his death, McPhee (No Ordinary Matter, 2004, etc.) creates a jaded, cynical romantic hero with mildly perverse sexual habits and enormous guilt. In 1948, Dante meets the Godfrey sisters, who have moved to Rome after faltering careers in Hollywood. Their names reflect their very different natures. Gladys has a sexual appetite as large and kinky as Dante’s, while Prudence offers intellect and love. Dante quickly beds Gladys, then works on wooing Prudence. Soon the three are ensconced in an unspoken ménage a trios. Dante engages in a publicly acknowledged love affair with Prudence while meeting his more carnal needs with Gladys, and every other woman who crosses his path. In between trysts and literary gatherings—there is much intellectual and cultural name-dropping of everyone from T.S. Eliot to Errol Flynn to Dante’s beloved, elusive Hemingway—Dante reviews his life with dissatisfaction. He feels guilty that as a young boy he hesitated before saving his neighbor from a beating. He blames the accidental, perhaps suicidal death of his first sweetheart, the lynchpin of a love triangle with his best friend, on his aloof reaction when she announced her pregnancy. He refuses to take credit for his resistance fighting against the fascists, portraying his heroism in the darkest possible light. Dante’s interval of joy with the Godfreys ends when Gladys becomes pregnant and marries an American she’s met on a movie set. The sisters return to America. Dante takes to the sea in a dinghy. By then, put off by his world-weary, self-centered voice as narrator, readers may be rooting for Dante’s suicide.
A sexy but self-conscious recreation of post–World War II European malaise.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58243-375-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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