by Adam Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 18, 2015
Bittersweet, elegant, full of hard-won wisdom: this is no ordinary book, either.
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A half-dozen sometimes Carver-esque yarns that find more-or-less ordinary people facing extraordinary challenges and somehow holding up.
Tragedy is always close to the surface in Johnson’s work—with tragicomic layerings, sometimes, but it’s tragedy all the same. So it is with the opening story of the six here, “Nirvana,” which takes its title from the Kurt Cobain–led rock band but shares a spirit with near-future films like Her and Gattaca. A software engineer, desperate to do right by his paralyzed wife, reanimates people from the past: “After the doctor left,” the narrator says matter-of-factly, “I went into the garage and started making the president.” It’s science fiction of a kind but with an extra element of disspiritment: people exist, but we long for simulacra instead of them, “like she’s forgotten that her arms don’t work and there’s no him to embrace.” With more than a nod to his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Orphan Master’s Son (2012), Johnson calls on two North Korean defectors who, now in the South, haven’t quite got their new world sussed out but are starting to get an inkling of how things work: “Christian talk, when said in a non-Christian way, scares these Southerners to death.” Their lessons in fitting in include essentials such as “handling money, hygiene, being pleasant, avoiding crime,” but it’s clear that no amount of instruction will make them feel at home. Safe houses, hospices, hospitals: these are the theaters where many of the stories take place, all enshrouded in a certain incomprehension—but, to Johnson’s great credit, seldom in hopelessness, for his characters are inclined to endure against the odds: “You turn the ignition and drop the van in gear, and you know this is no ordinary event.”
Bittersweet, elegant, full of hard-won wisdom: this is no ordinary book, either.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 9780812997477
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020
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
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by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw
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by Roy Jacobsen translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw
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by Roy Jacobsen & translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw
by Percival Everett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 21, 2001
More genuine and tender than much of Everett's previous work, but no less impressive intellectually: a high point in an...
Desperation outstrips the satire in Everett's latest exercise in narrative wizardry (Glyph, 1999, etc.), as a lonely African-American writer faces private torment and instant fame when his parody of ghetto literature is taken as the real deal.
His own generation's version of an invisible man, Thelonious Ellison, a.k.a. Monk, is a largely unknown academic novelist who visits hometown Washington, D.C., to give a paper and see his mother and sister. No sooner does he return to California than Sis, a doctor in an abortion clinic, is shot dead at work. Someone has to take care of Mom, who's showing the first wrenching signs of Alzheimer's, so Monk returns home. There, his frustration with a runaway bestseller written in ghettospeak by a bourgeois black woman after visiting Harlem for a couple of days is fueled by endless rejections of his own new manuscript; in a rage he pumps out a parody and sends it under a pseudonym to his agent—who promptly secures a six-figure advance and a seven-figure movie deal. Stunned that no one recognizes his book as a send-up, Monk refuses to let his true identity be known. Meanwhile, he must cope with his mother's rapid decline, his gay brother's sudden animosity, and the discovery among his father's papers of letters indicating not only that Dad had a white mistress long ago, but that Monk has a half-sister his age. Struggling to maintain his own identity as his creation looms larger than life and his family redefines itself, he makes choices that render him invisible no more.
More genuine and tender than much of Everett's previous work, but no less impressive intellectually: a high point in an already substantial literary career.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2001
ISBN: 1-58465-090-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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