“Basarian” is, apparently, used as a descriptive term among those who are familiar with the author’s work. Useful to know,...
The first English translation of Serbian writer Basara’s debut novel, written during the last gasp of East European communism and first published in 1984.
Some guy who may or may not be named Fritz (“Yesterday I had a different name. Today my name is Fritz”) has been left alone by two other guys and told to write his story. About anything. Say, “a hundred pages or so.” Now-Fritz is, at first, uncomfortable with such literary freedom. Upon reflection, he realizes that his blood is circulating and the Earth is in orbit. Soon, he adds: “I have one problem in life: I exist. My biggest success in life is that I’m not dead yet. My biggest failure in life is exactly the same thing: I’m not dead yet.” With the whole of existence as his subject, Fritz then touches on some of the subtleties of his own: He spends some time in the morgue watching a friend perform autopsies. He argues with his mother. His sister, who has a mole on her cheek, marries a butcher’s son, whom Fritz refers to as “the mongoloid.” He spends a lot of time waiting for the radio to play the song “Fascination.” Sometimes it does. Blue letters arrive from the two guys, containing math problems to solve and exhortations to meet his deadline. Pink letters arrive from a lovely teenaged girl who may have once been his neighbor and who has a mole on her cheek. Hypothetical flowerpots fall from the sky and change the course of hypothetical lives. White slave merchants steal Fritz’s mother. She is returned. Fritz turns in his story. It’s not exactly what the guys ordered. Unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness pages follow. Sometimes the radio doesn’t play “Fascination.” Upon reflection, the reader recalls that the Earth probably is still in orbit.
“Basarian” is, apparently, used as a descriptive term among those who are familiar with the author’s work. Useful to know, since a synonym does not spring readily to mind.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2004
ISBN: 1-56478-374-X
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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
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