A flinty, lyrical, and storm-clouded study of loss.
The myth of Athena inspires a deeply melancholy portrait of a fractured family in the debut novel by Boström Knausgård (Welcome to America, 2019).
“I am born of a father. I split his head,” says Anna, the novel’s young narrator, as if she’d sprung from the head of Zeus. It’s a metaphor, of course: The split head of the girl’s father evokes the schizophrenia that will send him to an institution and her to a foster home. Yet Boström Knausgård brings the metaphor intriguingly close to reality. Though we’re in the author’s native Sweden, Anna has an inherent connection to Greek roots: She obsesses over a map of the Mediterranean, and her prophetic babbling at the church her foster family takes her to turns out not to be speaking in tongues but Greek. Regardless of Anna’s provenance, her life is shot through with a profound sense of longing for her father and a host of failed strategies to connect with him. Church only deepens her sense of distance. The letters he writes her reveal frustratingly little. And channeling her inner Athena feels like a false front. (“I must become stronger. So strong that I won’t be the one who is alone, rather those who avoid me will.”) The somber, flat tone of the narrative (ably maintained by translator Willson-Broyles) gives the reader plenty of room to interpret Anna as mad or misunderstood, and Boström Knausgård’s imagery is piercing (“My scream was like a storm. Like pouring rain. My scream was like a spear. Like a way out”). As she becomes increasingly desperate to escape the institutions that constrict her (churches, schools, hospitals) and reconcile with her father, the latter pages of the narrative become mordant, a touch repetitively. But it’s a moving trip to an emotional bottom.
A flinty, lyrical, and storm-clouded study of loss.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64286-068-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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