A compelling novel that nonetheless carries the ponderous weight of the era’s events and ideas.
A newly translated 1930 novel by Hungarian author Márai, set among a group of young men during WWI, joins two other works by the author to enjoy recent play in the publishing sun: Embers (2001) and Casanova in Bolzano (2004).
This novel is set in 1918 in a small, provincial Hungarian town, where a group of schoolboys known to each other from youth have created a gang that empowers them in the face of a larger impending crisis of war and uncertainty. They have just taken their final exams and must decide what to do with their lives: Ábel, the doctor’s son, is orphaned, living under the care of his aunt, and, while dissolute, acts as the conscience among the others; Béla is the scruples-less grocer’s son; Tibor and Lajos Prockauer are brothers of a prominent colonel off at war, the latter boy having lost an arm in battle; and Ernõ is the cobbler’s son whose friendship with the others allows him entrée into a more genteel society. It is largely through Lajos that the gang makes the acquaintance of an obese itinerant actor overstaying his welcome in town, Amadé Volpay, whose flashy, insinuating ways draw in the young boys. The gang falls into petty thievery and even cheating among themselves, and they begin to resent all forms of authority: “They felt that the system that worked against them and dragged them back acted as perniciously in insignificant matters as in great affairs of state.” Tibor sells his sick mother’s priceless monogrammed silver to the shady pawnbroker Havas for quick money, which will eventually allow the grotesque Havas to blackmail them when he learns about their dissipated nights drinking and dancing with the actor. Márai weaves in elements of latent homosexuality amid the tangled relationships of the men and frequent chest-beating speeches about the crumbling of class and society that all point to the overall “cleansing” wrought by the war.
A compelling novel that nonetheless carries the ponderous weight of the era’s events and ideas.Pub Date: March 23, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-40757-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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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