A skillful tale that explores relationship nuances and redemption.
A United Nations civil servant recalls his complicated bond with a German friend and his Japanese violinist wife in this debut novel.
Mark Graham Sanders, a divorced U.N. human resources officer in his mid-40s, has a “fortuitous encounter” in 1999 while sketching in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which leads to his experiencing “that misty line” between love and friendship. Specifically, he meets a professional violinist named Yukari, the wife of Hans, a U.N. economist colleague. Mark is immediately attracted to her, and she seems drawn to him; she soon admits to Mark that she was contemplating leaving her husband after discovering that he’d had an affair. Yet the marriage continues on, aided, oddly, by their friendship with Mark. The trio enjoys many evenings of music and culture together and even discovers that their families were acquainted generations ago. As a pledge to their friendship, Mark and Hans plant blue roses in the U.N. garden, which also reflect the color of a dress that Yukari wears. After one intoxicating evening, Hans and Yukari sleep over at Mark’s apartment and conceive a child. The news of Yukari’s pregnancy arrives, however, just as Hans, frustrated in his career, decides to go on assignment in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mark gladly steps up to watch over Yukari, and the two grow ever closer. Then unexpected news comes from abroad, followed by the baby’s birth, and then tragedy. Debut author Keith probes the many shades of love, honor, and friendship in this musing, elegiac narrative. First-person narrator Mark is engagingly flawed; over the course of the story, he comes to realize just how despicable he was to have divorced his first wife due to their failure to conceive a child. The novel is a bit overloaded with international details, however, even encompassing a very minor character’s role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The best scenes are those that focus on the main trio’s dynamics, such as when Yukari makes love to Hans before whispering her love to Mark in the dark. Overall, it’s an elegant debut.
A skillful tale that explores relationship nuances and redemption.Pub Date: March 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4835-6219-3
Page Count: 200
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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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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