An erotic and disturbing depiction of the effects of grief.
A young woman flees from Rome to Shanghai after the death of her twin brother in this haunting tale by Italian author Di Grado.
Six months after her brother Ruben's death from a heart defect, the unnamed narrator leaves her boyfriend—as she says, “He was nice, but nice things were of no use to me anymore”—and moves to Shanghai, where her brother had longed to become a chef. She supports herself by teaching Italian to Chinese students whose grades aren't high enough for them to learn English, and at a club for Westerners, she meets a brittle, opaque woman named Xu. They begin an affair, and Xu's treatment of the narrator becomes increasingly brutal over the long autumn and winter through which their relationship unfolds. “She's the person I love. She's the person who can't love me,” the narrator writes. They meet in Xu's garbage-filled apartment and in an abandoned slaughterhouse, where, during their rendezvous, Xu savagely bites her. The narrator experiences China as “the country of philosophy and sex dolls” and Shanghai as a feverish dreamscape, a place of “water the color of arsenic.” In spite of all this, she thinks to herself, “I was in China, halfway across the world, but alas, I was still me.” While some readers may find the novel repetitious and repellent, it accurately depicts the state of mind of its bereaved heroine, as the city and her relationship with Xu mirror her descent into a deep depression and her gradual climb back into a version of her former life.
An erotic and disturbing depiction of the effects of grief.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-63557-949-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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