Atmospheric but amorphous, Morris’ restless novel works hard to encompass a cultural moment.
A panoramic portrait of jazz-era Chicago, where, against a background of speak-easies, racial tension and gangsters, a Jewish boy with a talent for “the devil’s music” observes and participates in the vibrancy of the day.
Chicago in 1915, inspiration for local writer L. Frank Baum’s Oz, “a place where you could package beef, ship wheat and make a fortune,” emerges as perhaps the most memorable character in Morris’ (The River Queen, 2007, etc.) new novel. Herself Chicago-raised, the author moves fluidly among the city's beachfronts and back streets, nightclubs and sweatshops, introducing a sizable cast of characters but focusing on three in particular. The first is Benny Lehrman, born with the century, an instinctive jazz pianist and composer. He first crosses paths with Pearl Chimbrova when both are children, on the fateful day the steamship Eastland sinks in the river, killing 844 people, including three of Pearl’s brothers. Last there is Napoleon Hill, a black jazz trumpeter whose struggles and defiance are part of the novel’s emphasis on racial injustice. All three seek escape, Benny and Napoleon in their music, Pearl in the deep waters of Lake Michigan, where she swims. Their destinies are intertwined with the city’s history, evoked by Morris through events large and small and the presence of famous figures: Rudolf Valentino, Louis Armstrong, Leopold and Loeb, and, of course, Al Capone. Sometimes evocative, sometimes overburdened by research, this is fiction as urban biography, the city's hectic years connected via the hazy, overlapping fates of three particular faces in the crowd.
Atmospheric but amorphous, Morris’ restless novel works hard to encompass a cultural moment.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53973-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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