A moving, albeit flawed, debut: the odyssey of a young woman searching for her identity on the plains of Africa. Profound and lyrical, occasionally didactic and clumsy, Svoboda's reflective first-person narrative wades through deep currents of emotion. The unnamed protagonist and her elusive lover are working on a cultural project. She records African songs and attempts to transcribe the lyrics; he's supposed to film the people at work and at play. But she has yet to see him pick up his camera, and he trades her cassettes for money, beer, and food, sabotaging her end of the project. The narrator, obviously low on self-esteem, doesn't protest when her lover eats food without offering her any (even though both are rationed to a single meal per day), nor when he uses supplies from her pack without her permission to pay for medical care for a sick woman and her feverish son. It's more than insecurity, though; she fears this man. When she grabs hold of a bat that she mistook for a papaya, she cannot cry out, because ``if I scream he will think I am afraid and then test me later in other places with that fear.'' She hears locals talk about her lover being a part of the CIA and wonders if it's only a joke; she watches silently as he ``fixes'' her tape recorder and returns it as a mess of nonfunctioning pieces. While readers suffer with her as she bemoans this relationship, we also get irritated when she rambles on about it: ``I wriggle and forget. I wriggle and forget and like it.'' Not until he steals her birth control pills and she stops menstruating does the narrator confront her fears and strike out on her own. But what she finds is just as complicated and painful as what she leaves behind. Sharp-boned writing that echoes for hours, but sometimes its message is confused.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1995
ISBN: 0-8147-8012-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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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