An intriguing but potentially tiresome jeu d’esprit.
A French academic’s detailed description of his Paris apartment and its contents is full of humor and brainy mischief. But whether it’s fun is another matter.
Clerc’s first book to be translated into English is subtitled “A Novel” and presents a meticulous examination of the one-bedroom flat owned by the narrator, who is named Thomas Clerc. Each of the seven areas of the 50 square meters (538 square feet, or about the size of the average Manhattan studio in 2015) is described in a chapter comprising short passages with droll headings. The few physical feet of the “Entryway” chapter alone require 25 pages. Clerc constantly interrupts his inventory with asides, reminiscences, analyses. He recalls a 2006 burglary. His doorbell rings, but no one is there. He alludes to Hitchcock’s Family Plot. He says, “Functionalism follows the form of its function.” It’s Page 16. The doorbell rings, but no one is there. He laments the lost storage space of his pedestal-style bathroom sink, which is “privileging a columnar form for the sake of 1 sink’s singular function qua sink.” It’s Page 38 and time to ask: Is this mélange of acuity and silliness, of pseudo-sociology and OTT TMI (wonderfully translated by Zuckerman, BTW) enjoyable enough to accept 300 more pages of the same? Clerc offers a few motifs. He links his decor at several points to pieces from the game Clue. Is there an unsolved mystery at play here? Could it be tied to why he never expands on the date he bought the flat: Sept. 11, 2001? And there’s that doorbell, which repeatedly summons the narrator. He never finds anyone there. Maybe the door, like so much in the apartment, serves only to ring a bell. Perhaps the interior on display is Clerc’s mind, the flat no more than a metaphor.
An intriguing but potentially tiresome jeu d’esprit.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-17686-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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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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