Lovely and difficult.
A novel in stories from the Israeli author of The One Facing Us (1998) and Bliss (2003).
This is the tale of an Egyptian-Jewish family living in a concrete shack on the outskirts of Tel Aviv in the 1950s and ’60s. There's a father—mostly absent—and a boy and two girls. Then there's the mother, Lucette, and “the mother” is precisely how her children refer to her. To them, she isn’t an individual person so much as she is a force—protean, predictably unpredictable, not quite human. “Our knowledge of her, which was made up of countless inner withdrawals, silent understandings and agreements, a weave of dread and love that kept changing its colors, had us riveted.” The Lucette that her children see is Lucette the immigrant, a woman who works 12-hour days at menial jobs, a woman who is now known by a name in a language she doesn’t even understand—her Hebrew name is Lavana; she speaks only Arabic and French. Everything soft and feminine she left behind in Egypt. Seen through the eyes of the younger daughter, Lucette’s existential instability is the central problem of the book. For this girl, the volatile politics of midcentury Israel mean nothing. It’s the war at home—the home her family struggles to regard as a home, the home that is a physical extension of the mother—that shapes her life. There’s little dialogue here, the setting barely shifts, and most of the action is internal. What Matalon offers instead of a traditional plot is a collection of nearly static scenes, many just a few hundred words in length. Cumulatively, they don’t create a narrative so much as a universe, a universe as rich and carefully drawn as it is harsh. Lucette’s youngest child is a careful observer—both as a girl and as an adult—and there is poetry on every page.
Lovely and difficult.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9160-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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