An extraordinary writer who deserves to be better known to readers in English—which, thanks to this excellent collection, is...
A welcome gathering of works by Finnish writer Krohn, a brilliant conjurer of possible worlds.
The narrator of Krohn’s early novel Doña Quixote and Other Citizens: A Portrait, a lovely reimagining of Cervantes, is a world-weary stranger in a strange land of rough stone and crowded towers who cannot bear the thought of living “on this rubbish-heap of a star for another thirty or forty or fifty years.” Doña Quixote, seer more than dreamer, becomes her Virgil in a place whose inhabitants bear names such as The Wader, The Looking-Glass Boy, and The Incurable One. In such a place, Doña Quixote sagely observes, “everyone has to be Hamlet.” Krohn’s imagined, ghostly worlds form the setting of other books gathered here, including Tainaron: Mail from Another City (1985) and Gold of Ophir (1987); these unfold in brief episodes, some just a few paragraphs long, that embrace improbable geometries and physics, worlds of “insignificant protuberances that were at first hardly distinguishable from the surrounding sandy plain,” say, that conjure up the hallucinatory closing pages of Poe’s tale of Arthur Pym. Krohn’s work has been likened to Ursula LeGuin’s, though often it is more reminiscent of Calvino, Borges, and Lem, layered in with foreboding bits of Lovecraft. Not exactly science fiction, not exactly fantasy, but some hybrid of those genres blended with literary fiction, Krohn’s tales often involve the exploration of consciousness both human and animal—and, at times, that of machines—against myth-tinged backgrounds, as with one story whose protagonist is the offspring of a human mother and “one of the first multi-species hybrids.” Philosophically nimble, those stories trade in wonderment: here time twists so that a figure “no longer owned anything, not even her own past,” while there a character comes to each word in her native language as if encountering it for the first time—though that may just be the effects of a dose of datura.
An extraordinary writer who deserves to be better known to readers in English—which, thanks to this excellent collection, is now possible.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9863177-2-9
Page Count: 890
Publisher: Cheeky Frawg
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.
Passion, friendship, heartbreak, and forgiveness ring true in Lovering's debut, the tale of a young woman's obsession with a man who's "good at being charming."
Long Island native Lucy Albright, starts her freshman year at Baird College in Southern California, intending to study English and journalism and become a travel writer. Stephen DeMarco, an upperclassman, is a political science major who plans to become a lawyer. Soon after they meet, Lucy tells Stephen an intensely personal story about the Unforgivable Thing, a betrayal that turned Lucy against her mother. Stephen pretends to listen to Lucy's painful disclosure, but all his thoughts are about her exposed black bra strap and her nipples pressing against her thin cotton T-shirt. It doesn't take Lucy long to realize Stephen's a "manipulative jerk" and she is "beyond pathetic" in her desire for him, but their lives are now intertwined. Their story takes seven years to unfold, but it's a fast-paced ride through hookups, breakups, and infidelities fueled by alcohol and cocaine and with oodles of sizzling sexual tension. "Lucy was an itch, a song stuck in your head or a movie you need to rewatch or a food you suddenly crave," Stephen says in one of his point-of-view chapters, which alternate with Lucy's. The ending is perfect, as Lucy figures out the dark secret Stephen has kept hidden and learns the difference between lustful addiction and mature love.
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6964-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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