Uneven but often striking work from one of the UK’s best younger writers.
The complications of loving and the pains of estrangement are explored with restrained wit and emotion in this new collection from the prizewinning Scottish author (Everything You Need, 2001, etc.).
The weakest of these dozen stories are generally those that don’t develop beyond core expressions of longing, regret, or resentment. “Not Anything to Do with Love,” for example, though beautifully written, amounts to little more than its unidentified narrator’s reflections on a recently concluded love affair. “Touch Positive,” about a recently discarded husband losing himself in quotidian errands, and “Awaiting an Adverse Reaction,” in which a woman being inoculated before taking a foreign trip considers escape from her nondescript husband, seem equally thin. But the strength of the volume is Kennedy’s command of several intriguingly varied voices, such as those heard in “An Immaculate Man,” which precisely records the emotional whirligig that engulfs a timid divorce attorney unhinged by what he takes to be a homosexual advance made by his married boss. In “Spared,” an unhappy husband finds both sexual gratification and apocalyptic terror in a hastily experienced adulterous dalliance. In the elaborately conceived “White House at Night,” a forensic expert investigating atrocities in an embattled Eastern European country is himself violated by stunned apprehension of his own romantic and sexual vulnerability. A boy too young and frail to defend his mother against his father’s abuse fantasizes becoming her avenger (“A Bad Son”). And a janitor who moonlights as an amateur magician (in “A Little Like Light”) must settle for the appearance rather than the reality of happiness in a sexless “affair” that leads him to realize that “The best love is a little like light. . . . It is beautiful and terrible and blinding and you will never understand the trick of it.”
Uneven but often striking work from one of the UK’s best younger writers.Pub Date: June 27, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-4055-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
Twenty-six tales by the 1982 Nobel Prize Winner, rearranged in roughly chronological order of writing. From the 1968 collection No One Writes to the Colonel come stories of the town of Macondo—about the much-delayed funeral of local sovereign Big Mamma, a dentist's revenge on the corrupt Mayor (extraction sans anesthetic), a priest who sees the Devil, a thief who robs the pool hall of its billiard balls. But the collection's standout—its title novella—is not included here. Likewise, the long title piece from the Leaf Storm collection (1972)—also about a Colonel—is omitted; but it does offer "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" and other beguiling fantasies. And, from 1978's Innocent Erendira And Other Stories comes an uneven mix of mystical fable and diffuse surrealism (some pieces dating, before English translation, from the 1940s or '50s). Much that's brilliant, some that's merely strange and fragmentary, and almost all enhanced by the translations of Gregory Rabassa and S. J. Bernstein.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1984
ISBN: 0060932686
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
A somewhat puzzling book, but — all in all — it is good Hemingway, and a sure sale. Key West and Cuba form the settings for a tough story of men at the end of their tether, grasping at any straw, regardless of risk, to turn a few dollars. Rum-running, smuggling aliens, carrying revolutionary arms. Gangsters, rich sportsmen, sated with routine, dissipated women and men — they are not an incentive to belief in the existence of decent people. But in spite of the hard-boiled, bitter and cruel streak, there is a touch of tenderness, sympathy, humanity. Adventure — somewhat disjointed. The first section seems simply to set the stage — the story starting after the prelude is over. The balance forms a unit, working up to a tragic climax and finale. There is something of The Sun Also Rises,and a Faulkner quality, Faulkner at his best. A book for men — and not for the squeamish. You know your Hemingway market. His first novel in 8 years.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1937
ISBN: 0684859238
Page Count: 177
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1937
BOOK REVIEW
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