A brief but memorable tale with prose that sings.
A lyrical historical novella about an elusive young Parisian woman who flees from her family and romantic relationships.
When Guy, a solitary banker, buys stolen roses from an 18-year-old “vagabond” named Emilie, they forge a tempestuous connection that binds them together for years. Though she now lives on the streets, the young woman is a member of one of the wealthiest families in the City of Light; she ran away as a child after the death of her parents in a train crash. Guy is enthralled with her after their first meeting, but after they become lovers, he finds that Emilie refuses most of the constrictions of Edwardian society, from corsets and hats to marriage. The traditionally minded Guy takes this as rejection, and after he impulsively abandons her at a train station, they’re separated forever, which tortures Guy for years. The novella gradually coalesces around the theme of the desire to define the people one loves in order make oneself feel safe. For Emilie, this is shown to feel like imprisonment, even though she longs for love. She continues to elude all who seek her—even her aunt and former nurse who’ve never forgotten their lost child. This novella is comprised of many poetic vignettes that come together for a tantalizing whole that still somehow feels incomplete, as if the reader is searching, and failing, to find Emilie. The chapters are told in a series of intimate stream-of-consciousness first-person perspectives, as in this narration from Guy: “I construct a play without words because I have said nothing to you, and you, in turn, have said nothing to me. Where in this universe are you that I should know your lost language?” All the characters feel like brief sketches except for Emilie herself, and some chapters are figments of her imagination. Indeed, the story circles her like a haunting dream, with imagery taking precedence over plot.
A brief but memorable tale with prose that sings.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781737521945
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Tattered Script Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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