A novel that explores questions of identity, memory, and blame and leaves many of those questions unanswered.
A young boy is adopted by the man who gunned down his family in this searing novel about the Lebanese civil war.
Maroun was 4 or 5 years old when his family’s car was stopped at the demarcation line dividing East and West Beirut. The men who stopped the car opened fire, and the boy was the only survivor. All of this is recounted within the first 20 pages of the new novel by Jaber (The Mehlis Report, 2013, etc.), winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. It’s what happens next that consumes the bulk of this slim volume. Maroun was adopted by one of those men who had recently lost a son of the same age to the wartime violence. Now a young man, Maroun has only just discovered the truth about his origins, which his brother confesses to him while they wait for their father to endure surgery. Maroun had grown up as one of the family’s own. Over the years, he’d noticed the strange looks that his mother and sisters would periodically give him, but that had been the extent of his knowledge. Now, he retraces his early memories and suspicions in an attempt to come to terms with his own identity. He’s desperate to parse his actual childhood from an imagined one. After describing one early memory, he asks, “Am I remembering it or imagining it? And how can I tell the difference? Memory’s a massive reservoir, it’s a deep well, it’s got layers upon layers upon layers—what does it bury, and what doesn’t it?” Jaber’s narrative follows the obsessive circuit of Maroun’s thoughts, which is circular and repetitive, doubling back on itself out of doubt and uncertainty. Still, “I’m trying,” he says, “to the best of my ability, to stick to a logical order. It’s important to have some command over the order of things: that’s important.” Maroun’s voice has the compulsive urgency of someone who has long kept silent and cannot stop speaking now that he has finally begun. He’s hyperarticulate in a panicked sort of way, but this turns out to be unfortunate, since it obscures other, more delicate questions. Did he blame his father for what he’d done? Did he blame his siblings, his mother? As brave and as brutal as Jaber’s novel is, it somehow fails to comprehend the scope of its own magnitude.
A novel that explores questions of identity, memory, and blame and leaves many of those questions unanswered.Pub Date: March 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2067-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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