Though the prose doesn’t set off sparks, Baeurdick finds an off-kilter way to explore a dour period in history.
A busy, lightly absurdist coming-of-age tale driven by the confusions of communism, religion and the space race.
Bauerdick doesn’t say in which country his debut novel is set, but the small town tucked near a Carpathian mountainside is plainly Romanian. The story opens in 1957, as young narrator Pavel observes his family and neighbors dispute the meaning of the second Sputnik launch. Communism thus far has been a distant drumbeat in the town of Baia Luna, but its threats soon draw closer: The local priest is found murdered, and Pavel’s teacher is discovered hanged. What ensues is largely a detective story, led by Pavel, involving the sexual peccadillos of Communist Party functionaries, complete with sordid photos and anguished diary entries. He won’t grasp the full extent of the drama till communism’s fall three decades later, but the story is leavened by a subplot involving Pavel’s grandfather’s determination to understand the fate of the Virgin Mary. In numerous set pieces, he argues with a local Gypsy about whether the holy mother ascended to the moon and whether the U.S. and Soviet space missions are really just efforts to prove (or disprove) her existence. As the men hunker down over Bibles and telescopes, Bauerdick reveals the bubble of ignorance that surrounded those living under communism, and he explores the push and pull between faith and growing totalitarianism. Bauerdick, via Dollenmayer’s translation, is a plainspoken writer, not given to metaphorical language or lyrical turns of phrase, and some plot turns feel baggy and overwritten. However, the novel captures the way communism slowly ground down its subjects, yet it doesn't feel like a falsely inflated epic, and the comic passages involving Pavel’s grandfather give the story a likable, quirky tone.
Though the prose doesn’t set off sparks, Baeurdick finds an off-kilter way to explore a dour period in history.Pub Date: July 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-59412-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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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