Weightless.
Tame novella about two trickster lions.
In Mexican author Ransom’s first book in English translation, two lions make their human owners and keepers do crazy things. Cattino, who can morph into a domestic cat at will, charms Sophia, an Italian countess, much to the dismay of her husband, Count Lorenzaccio. When Sophia and Cattino fly from Rome to New York to visit Lorenzaccio’s sister, only one—the Countess—disembarks at LaGuardia. Despite her husband’s pleas, Sophia has refused to speak to Lorenzaccio: She claims he bribed Alitalia baggage-handlers to “lose” Cattino. The scene shifts to Nairobi, where ne’er-do-well Jeremiah is hired to guard Pasha, a stuffed lion encased in glass on exhibit in the Ministry of Tourism’s opulent lobby. A bureaucrat, Redding, claims he shot Pasha on safari, but Jeremiah realizes that Pasha is not really stuffed; he’s only pretending to be inanimate when other people are around. After a Masai smashes Pasha’s cage, Jeremiah leaves, knowing Pasha will escape. The Nairobi police keep him under surveillance for lion theft. In the last of three sections, Cattino resurfaces in Rome after circumnavigating the globe in a jumbo-jet cargo hold. He’s quarantined by police, who will not restore him to Sophia—even intermittent lions are not legal pets—but agree to consign him to Don Stefano’s traveling circus. As a circus lion, Cattino exerts his spell on his keeper, who describes how he can’t really be tamed. His act, which sells out, consists in turning from lion to small cat and back again before the astonished spectators’ eyes. When the circus travels to Nairobi, Pasha joins them, adding his talent of mutating from stuffed to alive in seconds. The duo is unbeatable until the circus reaches Mexico City, where, anticlimactically, the felines wander off. A lion and a housecat are found under a bridge, Pasha really dead this time. But Cattino? Only the keeper suspects he’s still at large.
Weightless.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-393-32936-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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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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
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