Whether you call it “postmodern” or “meta-fiction,” there isn’t much here.
A slim, odd volume in which the Austrian novelist (Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, 2007, etc.) spins a story about storytelling.
The German-language original from 2004 receives an English-language translation, but the anonymous narrator of this tale fails to translate Don Juan’s exploits into a compelling account. And perhaps that’s part of the point, for despite the subtitle “His Own Version,” the voice throughout is that of a chef whose country French inn is all but shuttered until it receives as its guest (or fugitive) a breathless Don Juan, on the run from a motorcycle couple whose lovemaking had apparently been interrupted by his voyeurism. This Don Juan is not the figure of literary history, but a contemporary version (or almost contemporary, as one reference to a Walkman instead of an iPod suggests). Don Juan stays at the inn exactly a week, and on each day relates to the innkeeper what had happened on that day of the previous week—a different adventure, a different woman, a different country. Or does he? The narrator himself has no gift for narration, and Don Juan doesn’t give him much with which to work. “Again he did not describe the woman to me—needless to say, she was ‘indescribably beautiful,’ ” says the narrator, who later refers to the “meager details” offered by the guest. “At least that is how I pictured it, without his offering any details,” admits the narrator in recounting another episode. So, instead of Don Juan’s own story, as promised by the subtitle, this is the narrator’s story, conjured by the barest of prompts from his subject. The reader might even suspect that this Don Juan doesn’t exist at all, for the narrator never quotes him directly. Instead, he provides a parenthetical hint as to the nature of his protagonist: “(I noticed how often in his story Don Juan used the indefinite pronoun ‘one’ instead of ‘I,’ as if it were self-evident that what he experienced was applicable to everyone.)”
Whether you call it “postmodern” or “meta-fiction,” there isn’t much here.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-14231-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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