By its nature more somber than not, a variety of voices with important stories. Tie-in with World AIDS Day December 1, 2004.
A stellar roster, including five Nobelists—Gordimer, Grass, Oe, Marquez, and Saramago—offers 21 stories in a fundraising effort for HIV and AIDS in southern Africa.
Chinua Achebe’s “Sugar Baby” is a razor-edged retrospective look at one man’s inability to adjust to deprivation in the midst of protracted war. Margaret Atwood’s stunning “The Age of Lead” juxtaposes the narrator’s watching news reports about a sailor frozen on an ill-fated Arctic expedition with memories of her lifelong friend, bonded since their teens by a desire for a “life without consequences.” Now, Vincent is dead at 43 of “a mutated virus that didn’t even have a name yet”—the consequence of “things you don’t even know you’ve done.” In the powerful “The Ultimate Safari,” Gordimer’s narrator, a young girl in Mozambique whose mother has disappeared and whose father is in the war, flees with their [HER?] grandparents. They walk for days through Kruger Park, “a kind of whole country of animals—elephants, lions, jackals, hyenas, hippos, crocodiles”—to a refugee camp, where they live for more than two years, so long that the grandmother, whose husband disappeared on the trek, feels there is no home to return to. “Bulldog,” Arthur Miller’s straightforward Brooklyn coming-of-age story, revolves around a seductive woman selling puppies, while Njabule S. Ndebele’s heartbreaking “Death of a Son” chronicles the two weeks it takes for a young Johannesburg couple to get back their child’s body, killed when soldiers and police patrolling the township began shooting. Saramago’s “The Centaur” is the beautifully wrought parable of the last Centaur to survive, wandering for centuries until there is no longer a wilderness to hide in. John Updike’s ponderous “The Journey to the Dead,” about a man’s self-serving and increasingly awkward visits to a dying woman who was his ex-wife’s best friend, is one of the few clinkers.
By its nature more somber than not, a variety of voices with important stories. Tie-in with World AIDS Day December 1, 2004.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-42404-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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