A contemporary of the French New Novelists, Gombrowicz (Bacacay, 2004, etc.) may well be the missing link between Nikolai...
Like William Blake’s poetry, Gombrowicz’s darkly puckish novel, first published in Poland in 1965, strives to see the world in a mustard seed—and neither the attempt nor the results are pretty.
The narrator, casually identifying himself as Witold, is a student traveling through the Koscieliska region on vacation. Together with Fuks, another student, he finds a sparrow hanging from a tree in the woods outside the rooming house run by the Wojtys family. It’s obviously an omen, but the narrator’s preoccupation with its meaning is only the opening round in a series of ever more puzzling obsessions. He can’t help seeing an unspecified “relation” between the mouth of Katasia, the pension’s housekeeper, misshapen by a car accident but somehow erotic, and the more normal but inseparable mouth of Lena Wojtys, the daughter of the household. He’s fascinated by the wire mesh over an ashtray in the parlor. When Lena points out a crack in the dining room ceiling that looks like an arrow, he finds a remarkably similar arrow in the ceiling of the room he shares with Fuks. Other characters seem scarcely less obsessive. The master of the house constantly coins nonsense words he repeats more and more compulsively. Fuks’s only topic of conversation is his mistreatment by his boss Drozdowski, who never appears. When Lena’s cat is strangled and hanged like the sparrow, the narrator is as bewildered as everyone else. The answer—what answer there is—lies in the future, not the past. Long before the stunningly inconclusive fadeout, though, readers will have given up hope that these monstrous minutiae will ever yield the clear-cut meaning the narrator demands.
A contemporary of the French New Novelists, Gombrowicz (Bacacay, 2004, etc.) may well be the missing link between Nikolai Gogol and Nicholson Baker.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-300-10848-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
