Holy abstractions brightened by dollops of sex and violence.
Three novellas set in the author’s native Italy and connected by spiritual/religious themes of good and evil, love and redemption.
In the title story, Tamaro (Follow Your Heart, 1995, etc.) recounts a young girl’s downward slide after her mother’s death when the girl is eight. In her boarding school, she’s considered an orphan by the nuns until, several years later, a great-uncle and his wife become her guardians and she’s sent to visit them on her vacations. Unfortunately, unlike the kindly nuns, these relatives are cold and mercenary, their religion harsh. After various cruelties, the now-17-year-old drops out of school and works as a nanny for a teacher who treats her with real kindness and generosity. But the teacher’s husband takes advantage of her, then, to save face, accuses her of theft when she becomes pregnant. Having chosen to bear the child despite her unhappy past, she sits in the sun pondering good and evil. “Hell Does Not Exist” concerns a middle-aged woman whose recently deceased husband, a wealthy and educated man, showed a benevolent face to the world but was a viciously cruel husband and father. He despised his son Michelle for his sensitivity and his religious devotion; the story includes a long, almost unreadable letter from the saintly boy. After a violent argument, the man storms out of the house and, careening down the driveway in his car, accidentally strikes Michelle, killing him instantly. The woman can forgive neither him nor herself for her own weakness is staying married to such a man. The husband and father who narrates “The Burning Forest” killed his wife years earlier in an act of madness brought on by too much love when her growing independence (and religiosity) drove him toward a state of delusional paranoia. Redemption comes when his estranged daughter finally answers one of his letters.
Holy abstractions brightened by dollops of sex and violence.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-50351-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
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
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