Saizarbitoria’s study of wobbly relationships is something of a Basque rejoinder to a Bergman film, for good or ill,...
A sprawling novel of post–independence movement Basque life and its discontents.
Martutene is a tony residential district outside of San Sebastian, Spain, one of the most important centers of the modern Basque world. There, live two couples who, not having much else to occupy their lives ever since Spain granted the region autonomy, more or less, have slid off into a kind of bored decadence. Martin is a novelist whose keystone book, very much like this latest by Basque laureate Saizarbitoria, is “a novel in which nothing happens.” Dithering for years on a successor book, he lives in a kind of uneasy truce with Julia, a translator who reminds him daily, mostly without saying as much, of squandered ambitions. When she does say as much, well, does she: “What is it about this fucking novel that stops you from just fucking finishing it once and for all?” she thunders. Abaitua is a gynecologist, a profession, he jokes, that has allowed him “to get to know women better.” Perhaps not, since Pilar, a neurosurgeon, has grievances of her own. Into this milieu falls Lynn, an American sociologist who inhabits their world just as a character named Lynn does the world of Max Frisch’s novel Montauk, which is quoted and alluded to throughout the long proceedings; life and art weave and tangle, and in the end Lynn is as much symbol as character. But symbol of what? Perhaps of an assertive, all-conquering global Americanism. Suffice it to say that her presence doesn’t do much to improve the Basque characters’ behavior. Some of Saizarbitoria’s deeper themes may be lost on American readers, especially that of a kind of nostalgic nationalism—Julia and Martin’s house is overdecorated in the colors of the Basque flag, and it’s telling that when Pilar tells Abaitua off, he pauses, terrified by the look that’s in her eyes, to wonder why she’s speaking Spanish.
Saizarbitoria’s study of wobbly relationships is something of a Basque rejoinder to a Bergman film, for good or ill, glacially paced but rich in perception.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-84-944262-7-8
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Hispabooks
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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