Stylistically two-dimensional, with frozen surfaces that resist the reader.
An oddly vacant, cold-blooded tale of a wayward young wife in isolated coastal Norway.
The clue to this chilling tale is not what fails to happen to the stiff protagonist—anything of importance—but what Swiss-German novelist Stamm (Agnes, 2000) chooses to tell about her life. Kathrine lives in a land swathed for most of the year in frigid near-darkness. The next village is 40 kilometers away, and when it snows, “when it did nothing but snow,” the town shuts down. At 25, she’s already been married and divorced; she supports her child with a job as a ship customs’ officer and the help of her mother, a widow who, like all the old people in the town, “sat silently at home, watched television, and waited.” After a quick courtship, Kathrine remarries. Upstanding, wealthy Thomas seems to love her and like her son, but he exhibits some troubling symptoms of a controlling personality. He gradually removes from her apartment anything she owns and essentially takes over the management of her life. Kathrine begins to question the fabulous facts about his life that Thomas and his family have led her to believe. Summoning her will, she follows him one night, then confronts him with his lies. She boards a trawler headed south, admitting to her friend Harald (the captain) that she has never crossed the Arctic Circle. “Welcome to the world,” he replies, and thus Kathrine is on her way, hopping trains through Europe, passing through Paris and Boulogne, in search of a Danish acquaintance who shows her around but doesn’t want much to do with her. While Kathrine hates darkness and doesn’t particularly miss her son, she eventually returns, even though she doesn’t want to, because there seems no other place for her. She is the eponymous “unformed landscape,” but the author stubbornly refuses to disclose enough about her essence to deeply engage our sympathies.
Stylistically two-dimensional, with frozen surfaces that resist the reader.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59051-140-9
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Handsel/Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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