Lebrecht’s first novel (The Song of Names, 2004) was grounded by his deep knowledge of music, but here he is as unmoored as...
The psychic scars of a death-camp survivor just won’t stop itching.
When we meet Paul Miller he’s a popular guy in a mountain village in a thinly disguised Germany. The 30-something architect has just been elected the town’s first postwar mayor, winning over the residents with, of all things, an espresso machine installed in the ancient hostelry where he works. What they don’t see is the rage and self-loathing percolating behind Paul’s friendly façade. He is in torment because this is the same village that housed the notorious labor camp where he was confined during the war. Every day the prisoners would march past the gaze-averting villagers to break rocks in the quarry while Paul designed a weapon silo, watched by the brutal commandant Hans. After their liberation, Paul was nursed back to health by the innkeeper’s daughter Alice, a simple, loving soul who will later marry him and give him a son. What she can’t give him is peace of mind, for Paul carries heavy baggage. When war broke out in his native Poland, his parents and Jewish fiancée were seized; the fiancée was later crucified on a church door. Paul was blameless but is crippled by guilt, made worse by his irrational misgiving that he failed his fellow prisoners. From this material Lebrecht could have spun a revenge yarn, with Paul tracking down the evil Hans, or a couch drama, with Paul spilling his guts to an analyst. Instead he gives us a bit of both, but not in a way that creates suspense. Hans is found hiding in plain sight. Should Paul kill him? He and his analyst wrestle with this, though Paul had already decided in the camp that murder was not an option. The climax is a messy, melodramatic compromise.
Lebrecht’s first novel (The Song of Names, 2004) was grounded by his deep knowledge of music, but here he is as unmoored as his hapless hero.Pub Date: July 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-37725-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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