Allegorical but matter-of-fact: a fine debut, layered with meaning and shades of sorrow.
Winner of Finland’s highest literary honor for best debut novel, an elegant, allegorical portrait of lives lived at the margin, minorities within minorities in a new land.
Bekim is Muslim and gay, the son of a woman who left fragmenting Yugoslavia with her domineering, moody husband for a new life in Finland. Now, in Helsinki, where Bekim is not entirely at home though a productive citizen, he has come into the orbit of a talking cat who sucks down alcohol and has any number of dislikes and—well, pet peeves. “Gays. I don’t much like gays,” says the cat, before amending the remark to, “Obviously, I like all kinds of toms, but I hate bitches!” That explains the cat’s presence in a gay bar, perhaps, but it does nothing to relieve Bekim’s angst, especially when the cat hisses that no one will ever love him. His mother, Emine, meanwhile, has grown from an utterly ordinary person, “only pretty and good at housework, or so I’d been told,” as she says, to a self-aware woman who finally frees herself from a bad marriage and a life where “our entire existence hung on our children who had decided to have nothing to do with us.” Statovci’s characters might prefer to live quietly on the sidelines, but events in Kosovo overturn their lives, even from afar; witnessing one in a long series of atrocities on the news, Emine concludes, “God did nothing with that child because there was no God.” Strangers in an uncomprehending new home, Statovci’s actors make do, alert for possibilities of happiness, however unattainable. Statovci doesn’t quite make full use of his fantastic cat; though he invests his creation with plenty of personality, Statovci lacks Mikhail Bulgakov’s flair for satirical meaning-making through the use of animal characters. As it is, though, the creature turns out to be a complex character, tormented as well as a tormentor. And that’s not to speak of Bekim’s pet snake, who has dangerous ideas of his own.
Allegorical but matter-of-fact: a fine debut, layered with meaning and shades of sorrow.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-87182-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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