Swedish writer Ekman, author of 17 novels, debuts in English with this prizewinning thriller: a literary crime story for readers who thought Peter Heg's Smilla's Sense of Snow was too upbeat. Arriving at the Swedish commune Starhill to join her lover Dan Ulander, Annie Raft stumbles on two corpses lying in a tent and sees a boy running from the scene. Eighteen years later, she and her daughter, Mia, see the boy, now grown to manhood. Before Annie can tell the authorities that she's recognized their only lead in the unsolved case, Mia is killed. But alert readers will long since have surmised that the boy she saw was Johan Brandberg, who fled his miserable family after escaping from the well his resentful stepbrothers had lowered him into. Taking with him an eel he rescued from the well, Johan had hitchhiked with an older woman calling herself Ylja across the border to Norway, where the woman briskly relieved him of his virginity, established him as the latest incarnation of the mystical Traveler who was prophesied to arrive with a live animal, and finally drove him away. The frenzy of isolation to which Ylja pushes Johan is mirrored by Annie's own alienation back in Starhill, where the hatred of Swedes for Lapps and commune members for the bourgeois who surround them—not to mention the rivalries within the commune—finally reaches toxic proportions. In an Arctic landscape whose grim determinism recalls Hardy, commune families grow, harden into deformity, or split up with chill fatalism, and readers impatient with Ekman's brooding vignettes of calcifying loneliness are likely to feel like polar explorers trudging along under heavy loads in the worst weather, hoping to find, in the aftermath of Johan's return, the key that will redeem their ordeal in a burst of wild insight. Not for the impatient or fainthearted: a dour study of murder as the logical outgrowth of simmering, all-consuming rage.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-48178-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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