Emotionally gratifying and spiritually challenging—a compelling novel that grabs the reader’s psyche and won’t let go.
Building his plot around the issue of child abuse by Catholic clergy, Olafsson (One Station Away, 2017, etc.) explores complex issues of morality and, to quote Corinthians, “faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
Locked in a broom closet as punishment for a minor offense, Icelandic Catholic schoolboy Unnar witnesses Father August Frans fall from a bell tower to his death in 1987. French nun Sister Johanna Marie is in Reykjavik at the time investigating anonymous charges of abuse against August Frans. Thirty years later she revisits the city because Unnar has written saying he has more information to give her concerning what he saw. Olafsson’s portrait of his homeland is almost as vivid as his portrayal of narrator Sister Johanna Marie, whose measured, melancholy voice expresses great internal ferocity. Traveling back to Reykjavik, the now aged nun reconsiders her 1987 investigation as well as her life in Paris during the 1960s, both times of emotional stress. As a repressed Sorbonne student named Pauline, she fell deeply in love with her Icelandic roommate, Halla, drawn to Halla’s capacity for joy (and love of the Beatles). Although Pauline never expressed her passion, Father Raffin, an observant young priest, shamed her into cutting off communication with Halla. Pauline became a nun out of “despair,” hoping to “find freedom in faith.” As a rising star at the Vatican in the 1980s ambitious, morally ambiguous Raffin, whose “ability to speak to people as if he were standing in their shoes, and yet at the same time superior” represents the church's power over its congregants, deliberately sent Johanna Marie to Halla’s home, Iceland. Her task proved impossible: Despite evidence of harmed children, a wall of silence encircled August Frans—Olafsson implicates church authorities without becoming polemical—forcing the nun into enormous, life-altering choices, including whether to seek Halla. Now returning to Iceland, again at Raffin’s order, Johanna Marie faces distressing truths yet finds something like peace.
Emotionally gratifying and spiritually challenging—a compelling novel that grabs the reader’s psyche and won’t let go.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-289989-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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