An atmospheric debut, capturing the slow-moving rhythms and ordinary tragedies of Irish country life.
A lovely, moody debut collection examines hardscrabble days in rural Ireland.
In four long stories O’Keeffe brings the reader to the village of Kilkelly and its environs, where love, jealousy and madness underscore the persistent loneliness of country life. Though taking place in the 1950s and ’60s, the tales seem from an age long ago: One young woman delivers milk in a pony-cart, another listens to the wireless. Rural poverty brings with it a kind of isolation that defies time. In the best piece, “Her Black Mantilla,” young orphan Alice is sent to Tarkey’s farm. She’s to help with the milking and also with James, gored by a bull many years ago and left to the quiet of his room. Middle-aged Davie Condon senses something familiar behind the black mantilla covering Alice’s face, something reminiscent of his pregnant Margaret, abandoned and forgotten long ago. As Davie spies on her from across the field, Alice gets strange comfort from James as she washes his shrunken body and listens to his tales of lost love. In “The Postman’s Cottage,” widowed Kate Dillon, returning from her very first trip out of the village, to visit her son in Dublin, shares the train ride with Timmy O’Rourke, nephew of handsome, notorious Eoin, who courted Kate as a young woman. As their train conversation progresses, Kate recalls the details of Eoin’s disappearance; at the time, he was assumed to be a suicide, but now Kate faces the awful truth that he was murdered, and knows who did it. The titular novella spans the 20th century. Young Jack is mesmerized by the short life of Albert Cagney, a WWI veteran who returned shell-shocked from the trenches, killed himself, and thus altered village life. Jack spends some summer weeks with his old Aunt Mary, a spinster still holding on to the memory of her Albert while the rest of the village tries to forget.
An atmospheric debut, capturing the slow-moving rhythms and ordinary tragedies of Irish country life.Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03398-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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