Bronsky's warmth, humor and sharp observational eye combine to make this coming-of-age tale a rich, affecting read.
A German teen learns the importance of friendship, family and forgiveness in Bronsky's third novel (The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, 2011, etc.).
After Marek is attacked by a Rottweiler, his disfigured face isn't the only thing giving pain to the formerly handsome teenager. Enrolled in a small "cripple" support group by his divorced mother, Claudia, Marek idles between disgust and contempt for his fellow group members, his mother, and society at large. The six-person group is led by a seemingly unscathed "guru" whose unusual practices, including encouraging the group to film each other for a documentary, cloak a secret. Then Marek receives news that his father, who remarried and fathered a young boy, has died in a mountain-climbing accident; the boy's journey to bury his father and spend time with his half brother and stepmother allows him to come at last to the core of his own humanity. There are no draggy sections thanks to the book's nimble pacing and funny, vivid imagery ("The guru closed his eyes. Then he opened them again and exhaled slowly, like a boy who has just accidentally climbed up to the ten-meter diving platform"). Bronsky's organic revelations, which often take place in the middle of a phone conversation or in the observation of a quiet moment, propel the story forward while catching the reader off guard. Although Marek is narrating, the reader gleans his true character from the flinches, winces and face punches he elicits from those around him. By exploring what happens when one’s public face is literally gone, Bronsky thoughtfully asks what constitutes one’s fundamental identity. The answer to this question informs the book's title: We are ultimately defined by the people in our lives and how we show our love for them.
Bronsky's warmth, humor and sharp observational eye combine to make this coming-of-age tale a rich, affecting read.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60945-229-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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