THE COLOUR OF WATER

Name: THE COLOUR OF WATER
Author: Angela Green
ISBN: 0-7206-1204-7

by Angela Green ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 5, 2003

The coincidences become a bit much, but this high-lit remake of Casablanca is quite readable and not nearly as contrived as...

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An elegiac second novel from Green (Cassandra’s Disk, 2002) portrays an older woman living in seclusion prompted to remember the loves and betrayals of her early years.

As the story begins in February 1964, Anna Larssen Galland is spending her second winter on a remote island off the coast of Norway. She moved there from France, where her husband Vincent had drowned under suspicious circumstances in 1958, telling no one where she was except her New York publisher, whose translation commissions enable her to support herself. Was it simply grief that drove her to this isolated retreat? Yes and no. Long before Vincent’s death, Anna had seen enough tragedy to fill an opera. Born and raised in Norway, she moved to Paris with her French mother after her father died. There, she met and fell in love with Vincent, a Czech Communist active in the Resistance who was later captured by the Nazis and reported dead. The devastated Anna was consoled by a mysterious American named Harry Quinn, but not long after they became lovers, she learned that Vincent was alive. She left Harry to nurse her husband back to health and smuggle him out of Europe. In Lisbon, unable to obtain visas to emigrate, they were advised that their only hope was a black marketer named . . . Harry Quinn! He helped them make their way to New York, where Vincent became a spokesman for the Free French government and, after the Liberation, received a hero’s welcome in Paris. Anna recalls these events on her island, prodded by the arrival from her publisher of a trashy American “novel” that relates the most intimate details of her marriage. Is this blackmail, or just poor taste? In order to understand the mystery of her husband’s death, Anna must sort out the greater mysteries of his life—and hers.

The coincidences become a bit much, but this high-lit remake of Casablanca is quite readable and not nearly as contrived as it sounds.

Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2003

ISBN: 0-7206-1204-7

Page Count: 236

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LEGACY
by Angela Green

- BOOK REVIEW
CASSANDRA’S DISK
by Angela Green

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FRIDAY BLACK

by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2018

Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.

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Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material sliced off the front pages.

The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’ expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,” is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example, identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly framed in the context of an African fable.

Corrosive dispatches from the divided heart of America.

Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-328-91124-7

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- PROFILES
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

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NEVER LET ME GO

by Kazuo Ishiguro ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2005

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.

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An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).

Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.