Nothing innovative here, but Hettche manipulates the genre’s conventions, and the reader’s pulse rate, with enviable skill.
A possible miscarriage of justice drives the busy plot of this complex legal thriller, the first English-translated work of a popular German author.
Hans Arbogast, a married traveling salesman whose brief sexual encounter with a female hitchhiker resulted in her death, is convicted in 1953 of second-degree murder. Did Marie Gurth, a former resident of an East German refugee camp, die of strangulation?—or, as Arbogast ingenuously alleged, of natural causes following rough sex? It’s only after Arbogast has spent 16 years in Bruchsal Penitentiary that crime-novelist and human-rights activist Fritz Sarrazin and attorney Ansgar Klein manage to get the case reopened. All turns on whether an overzealous prosecutor coerced Arbogast’s confession and a prosecution witness willfully obscured details of an autopsy report that noted in the deceased woman’s body “a weakened condition as a result of a partial abortion.” (This is all based on a notorious real case.) Hettche maintains a brisk pace throughout, juxtaposing Arbogast’s prison experiences and confused memories of his misadventure with the actions of a host of involved legal, criminal, and forensic authorities. The result is a convincing cross-section of postwar German society, and the tantalizing implication that divisions among Hans Arbogast’s accusers and defenders parallel Berlin’s awkward status as a divided city. Sarrazin and Klein are absorbing characters, and the enigma of Arbogast continually deepens, particularly during his explosive retrial testimony. Hettche stumbles with the character of forensic pathologist Katja Lavans, whose interest in the case becomes more than clinical. But he rekindles interest smartly in the closing pages, in which the “accident” that caused Marie Gurth’s death is speculatively declared “an eruption . . . a vestige from the war that suddenly discharged.”
Nothing innovative here, but Hettche manipulates the genre’s conventions, and the reader’s pulse rate, with enviable skill.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-13812-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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