A stew of tongues, English, French, German, whathaveyou, in an overrich slumgullion or Irish mulligatawny, with a faint tang of urine. Young Sam Beckett (1906-83) wrote this autobiographical first novel at 26, for money he hoped, knocking out the earliest draft in a few weeks. But no publisher would accept it, and so for the rest of his life he withheld it from publication and cannibalized many passages that showed up in later better works. Would he be humiliated now by its utter bombast? Well, he seldom liked anything he wrote, so most of what he published was an act of self- mortification.... The ``principal boy'' here is Belacqua, or Beckett (a Mr. Beckett tells the story), whom we meet masturbating on the end of a dock while dreaming of his German girlfriend Smeraldina-Rima. His family arises and fades from the page almost at once and is ever after mentioned only as ``the clean blue eyes of home''—or ``a distant dog in the evening barking.'' The satire on everyone herein is pitiless, when you can make it out as such, for to say that the novel has a plot and characters is to say too much about Bel's wanderings, ruined feet, and worse love life. As Mr. Beckett tells us, any unity in this novel is ``involuntary'': ``The blown roses of a phrase shall catapult the reader into the phrase that follows. The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence communicated by the intervals, not the terms of the statement...'' To be sure, glorious plums pop up: ``The night firmament is abstract density of music, symphony without end, illumination without end, yet emptier, more sparsely lit, than the most succinct constellations of genius.'' All ends in a stupendous uproar at a literary musicale with Belacqua soaking drunk (```Here,' he said rudely, `I float'''), followed by his ulcerous hangover and a Hamletic disquisition about his hand. A clump, a clot, a coagulum—an unspeakable miracle of words held together by spit.
Pub Date: April 13, 1993
ISBN: 1-55970-217-6
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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