Poet and novelist Svoboda (Cannibal, 1995) offers an oddly disjointed account of a young woman stranded on a tiny Pacific island recently contaminated by radioactive fallout. “All tourists think their island’s far, but this island’s really far.” So far off the beaten path, in fact, that our narrator Clare isn—t altogether sure that she—ll ever be able to find her way home again. An advertising copywriter, Clare accompanied a film crew to a remote Pacific Rim island in order to shoot a TV commercial. With a bit of time on her hands—just why a copywriter would be needed on a television shoot is a good question never addressed’she decides to travel here and there on her own, and ends up on an even more remote island with very irregular boat service and few amenities. Peace and quiet are fine by her, but in short order Clare gets her fill of solitude and pines to leave again. The boat she plans to take, however, shoves off early in a sudden hurry, and everyone turns vague and noncommittal when she asks about the next one. Another boat finally pulls in, but it’s flying the flag not of any country but of an international health organization. The passengers greet Clare, along with the others who are clambering aboard, with Geiger counters: there has been a nuclear test on a nearby island, and the fallout may have reached their apparent Eden. This comes as an unpleasant shock, of course, but even so, Clare’s reaction is rather extreme: she jumps overboard and swims back to the island. There, she resumes her life of ennui among the locals and expats. Why? Another good (and unanswered) question. Clare apparently finds some peace in her confinement, although she doesn—t succeed in communicating it—or anything else—especially well. Wonderfully written, though bafflingly obscure. Svoboda writes in a meditative style that seems incapable of containing a narrative, much less relating it.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-58243-001-2
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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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