Wistful but (thankfully) not whimsical. Funny, alarming, and, in a Slavic way, not unlike early Pinter.
A writer is sucked gently into the evil new Ukrainian economy as his penguin flatmate watches.
Soviet Kiev was no place for a thoughtful writer like Viktor Alekseyevich, but the post-Bolshevik city seems little better. Things are so bad that, for example, the Kiev zoo has had to de-access animals to stay within its budget. In an act of either mercy or work-avoidance, Viktor, dumped by his girlfriend, took on the care and feeding of Misha, a newly homeless penguin, who turned out to be not such a bad roomie. Quiet and thoughtful, Misha needs only a few frozen fish a day, and he’s affectionate in a non-fawning way. Perfectly content to stand behind the sofa or out on the balcony while Viktor types extremely short stories that have no market no matter how free that market may now be, Misha is unfazed by the occasional pop of gangster gunfire in the streets. Viktor and Misha’s quiet life peps up a bit when the editor of the Capital News calls to see whether he’s interested in writing what they call obelisks: pre-need obituaries for luminaries in the thriving Kievan underworld. Sure. Why not? The money is good, the work oddly interesting. And Viktor has the touch. He brings a novelist’s sensibility to this obscure, unsung (no byline for Viktor) art form. It’s a bit shaking when his obelisks are in ink and it dawns on Viktor that people are dying out there, thanks to whoever is assigning the work. But there are new complications requiring money and attention. A fleeing acquaintance leaves his young daughter (who adores Misha) with Viktor, and Viktor befriends the city’s expert on penguin care, an embittered academic on his way out of this world. Then Viktor takes on an attractive nanny for little Sonja. Is a nuclear family a possibility? Have to think about that. However well obelisk writing pays, those murders are, after all, murders.
Wistful but (thankfully) not whimsical. Funny, alarming, and, in a Slavic way, not unlike early Pinter.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-86046-835-7
Page Count: 230
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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