Molinaro, replacing her mildly experimental style of previous fictions (The New Moon with the Old Moon in Her Arms, 1993, etc.) with mostly straight-ahead narrative, effectively retells the Oedipus myth from the viewpoint of his mother/wife, who knows the terrible secret but chooses to marry her son anyway. In a series of short chapters, which stay mostly with Jocasta's perspective (but which also range from Oedipus and the couple's daughter, Antigone, to the man/woman prophet Tiresias), Molinaro limns a thesis she first puts forth in an author's note: ``The myth of Oedipus...retells the ritualistic slaying of the old king, and the queen's remarriage.... Queen Jocasta's suicide is a protest against Oedipus claiming the throne in patrilinear succession.'' Fortunately, Molinaro doesn't let such pedantry get in the way of a good story. Jocasta, who is ``Hera's highpriestess, after all,'' becomes pregnant with Oedipus on a night when ``female power will be at its apex,'' loses her son in a country where ``bribery is booming,'' and lives through the death of her husband, Laius, and subsequent remarriage to her son by deciding to ``discipline my mind not to think anything I don't want him to know.'' Molinaro plays around with ideas and subplots as Oedipus writes home to his ostensible parents, enjoys masochistic sex with Jocasta, has children, and puts Tiresias on the trail of the oracular mystery, foreshadowing the fateful moment. When it arrives, Jocasta throws herself to her death, offering ``a long-due sacrifice.'' In a playful epilogue, Antigone, among others, helps to finish the story, which her dead mother and blind father can no longer tell: ``Father was so worried that holding my hand might be misinterpreted we finally acquired a staff, and both held onto it.'' It's the flip side of the Oedipus Complex, what Freud might have made of the Greek tragedy had he been a woman and a novelist. Molinaro's most accessible work.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1994
ISBN: 0-929701-44-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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