A promising debut of interest to students of modern French literature.
Crime and punishment in 1950s Algeria.
Fernand Iveton would never dream of harming a fellow member of the working class. Alas, in an act of sabotage gone awry, he has, though, and he’s been arrested for his troubles. It’s no ordinary arrest, for Fernand, though European, is a prominent figure in the movement to free Algeria from French rule. “Where’s the bomb, you son of a bitch?” an interrogator shouts before punching him so hard that “his jaw makes a faint cracking sound.” Worse is yet to come for him and some of his comrades. Iveton, a real figure executed in 1957, emerges in Andras’ novel as a rough-edged but principled revolutionary, one who “may not have read Marx like the party leaders” but whose commitment to an independent Algeria of “Arabs, Berbers, Jews, Italians, Spaniards, Maltese, French, Germans…” is very real. Fernand doesn’t budge in this commitment in Andras’ slender narrative, and neither does his faithful wife, a Polish immigrant he met in France. Andras’ scenes move back and forth in time and space from Paris and the French countryside to Algiers—in the latter, mostly a dusty prison yard where nothing much happens even as, beyond the walls, French labor unions and leftist politicians agitate for Fernand’s release. Their efforts are in vain: The verdict of guilty “falls like the blade that is now promised to him,” a verdict that Hélène and Fernand accept with grim stoicism. As Andras writes in the afterword to his book, which won the Prix Goncourt for a first novel, the case of Iveton was once so well known that Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a memorial essay about him in Les Temps modernes, and, it’s said, Albert Camus tried to plead for his freedom. It is almost forgotten today, and though mostly affectless in tone, Andras’ novel revives a lost moment in history, neatly bookending Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation.
A promising debut of interest to students of modern French literature.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-78873-871-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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