With a ferocious and probing style, Kennedy examines love and pain and the whole damn thing.
On an ocean liner during a trans-Atlantic voyage, emotions are intensified as love relationships get tossed about.
Elizabeth and Derek are a couple—sort of. At least they’re sharing a cabin onboard the ship. They’re almost engaged, but not quite, and Elizabeth is looking for reasons to escape from the relationship. Derek is a con artist, a profession that doesn’t carry well into romance. Onboard, they meet Arthur Lockwood, yet another con artist, and although Elizabeth pretends to be meeting Arthur for the first time, it turns out they’d been lovers years before, and she wants to hide this fact from Derek. This is easily done, for Derek becomes devastatingly seasick and for days is immobilized in their cabin. Elizabeth gradually, and at first reluctantly, enters into the force field that is Arthur, a charming older man still very much taken with Elizabeth. Despite her initial reticence, she gradually begins to spend more time with Arthur, and eventually, they rekindle their affair. Kennedy becomes lyrically erotic when she gets these two back together. In the interstices, Elizabeth and Arthur and Derek meet other passengers on the voyage, most notably Bunny and Francis, the latter of who is pleased to see Elizabeth turning away from Derek. As Francis explains, “I do get tired of seeing fantastic women with appalling men. It’s like some form of blood sacrifice, self-harm”—not that Elizabeth needs too much nudging. Kennedy occasionally takes us away from the claustral atmosphere of the ship to fill in the gaps in Elizabeth’s previous life.
With a ferocious and probing style, Kennedy examines love and pain and the whole damn thing.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-02770-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.
The husband-and-wife team who have given us refreshing English versions of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov now present their lucid translation of Tolstoy's panoramic tale of adultery and society: a masterwork that may well be the greatest realistic novel ever written. It's a beautifully structured fiction, which contrasts the aristocratic world of two prominent families with the ideal utopian one dreamed by earnest Konstantin Levin (a virtual self-portrait). The characters of the enchanting Anna (a descendant of Flaubert's Emma Bovary and Fontane's Effi Briest, and forerunner of countless later literary heroines), the lover (Vronsky) who proves worthy of her indiscretion, her bloodless husband Karenin and ingenuous epicurean brother Stiva, among many others, are quite literally unforgettable. Perhaps the greatest virtue of this splendid translation is the skill with which it distinguishes the accents of Anna's romantic egoism from the spare narrative clarity with which a vast spectrum of Russian life is vividly portrayed.
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89478-8
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
PERSPECTIVES
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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