“I prefer travelers’ tales to love stories,” says our narrator. There are plenty of both in this lyrical novella.
A voyage—if not of the damned, then certainly of the heartbroken.
Seghers, who died in 1983, was a prominent writer in the former East Germany, complicit but not uncritically part of it. Given that stories in Stasiland were best off delivered under a veil, she wrote deflectively, with stories within stories and multiple narrative points of view containing thin criticisms of things as they were. So it is in this book, originally published in German in 1971. Its protagonist, Ernst Triebel, is not its narrator, a dutiful engineer named Franz Hammer who services agricultural machinery. In that role, work has taken him to Brazil, from which, returning to the GDR, he meets Triebel, a longtime exile who is unenthusiastic about medicine and star-crossed in love. He has stories about both, and there are others to pick up the narrative onboard as well, for, as Triebel says, “We’ve enough time for storytelling…almost three weeks.” The stories themselves, wrapping around allusions to Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness, build on themes of lost friendship and unrequited love; they tend to be simple and direct, but in the end they are also commentaries on the nature of storytelling itself. As the book proceeds, other themes come into play, such as the baleful legacy of German nationalism and anti-Semitism. There’s no grim social realism in these pages but instead a delight in the pleasures of spinning tales in detail-caressing language, not least when describing the Beatrice of the piece: “She’s as lovely, lithe and golden brown as some girls of this city,” Triebel achingly recalls of his childhood love, another German exile in Brazil. Throughout are surprising glimpses of life behind the Wall, as when Seghers writes of the hope of her generation that West Germany would not remain divided from the East but would instead unify with it for a glorious future.
“I prefer travelers’ tales to love stories,” says our narrator. There are plenty of both in this lyrical novella.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-935084-94-5
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Dialogos
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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