The sensual but grim story of damaged souls never rises above a simmer.
Swedish novelist Swärd’s American debut chronicles the slightly off-kilter friendship between a young girl from an unconventional Swedish family and an older boy who has immigrated to Sweden from Hungary with his father.
Before her birth in 1969, Lo’s extended family moved to the more refined south from hardscrabble northern Sweden at the urging of Lo’s paternal grandfather, Björn. His son is Lo’s father, David, but the love between Lo’s parents is shadowed by the unspoken, unconsummated passion between Lo’s mother, Katarina, and Björn. Raised in a household of 13 adults—her parents, her grandparents on both sides and various aunts and uncles—Lo remains happily swathed in the family’s love and protection until she is 6, when she meets Lukas at a fire that has broken out in the village. Already 13, Lukas seems younger since he has barely been domesticated. He lives with his father, who speaks no Swedish and beats him. After he rides her home on his bicycle, Lukas and Lo form an immediate bond. Lukas is every mother’s nightmare—too old, too wild—and Lo’s family forbids their friendship. Lo is an able if disinterested student; Lukas can barely read. But Lo remains undaunted in her loyalty. For years, she and Lukas meet regularly at the abandoned cabin in the woods. They watch Katarina’s favorite French film Breathless and swim naked in the stream. They are physically at ease with each other’s bodies, but even after Lukas reaches horny adolescence, there’s no sexual experimenting. At 15, Lo travels to Copenhagen with Lukas, now a working adult, at least on the surface. His physical desire manifests itself. But his love remains pure. Lo’s does not. And her betrayal haunts her into adulthood. Interspersed with Lo’s recollections of her childhood are descriptions of her wandering adulthood and loveless adult sex life.
The sensual but grim story of damaged souls never rises above a simmer.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-02654-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
A little-known story that will have special resonance for today’s resisters.
Based on an actual incident in Nazi-occupied Belgium, Ramzipoor’s debut is a tragicomic account of fake news for a cause.
Structured like a heist movie, the novel follows several members of a conspiracy in Enghien, Belgium, who have a daring plan. The conspirators do not intend to survive this caper, only to bring some humor—and encouragement for resisters—into the grim existence of Belgians under Nazi rule. To this end, the plotters—among them Marc Aubrion, a journalist and comic; David Spiegelman, an expert forger; Lada Tarcovich, a smuggler and sex worker; and Gamin, a girl masquerading as a male street urchin—intend to...publish a newspaper. And only one issue of a newspaper, to be substituted on one night for the regular evening paper, Le Soir, which has become a mouthpiece for Nazi disinformation. Le Faux Soir, as the changeling paper is appropriately dubbed, will feature satire, doctored photographs making fun of Hitler, and wry requests for a long-overdue Allied invasion. (Target press date: Nov. 11, 1943.) To avoid immediate capture, the Faux Soir staff must act as double agents, convincing (or maybe not) the local Nazi commandant, August Wolff, that they are actually putting out an anti-Allies “propaganda bomb.” The challenge of fleshing out and differentiating so many colorful characters, combined with the sheer logistics of acquiring paper, ink, money, facilities, etc. under the Gestapo’s nose, makes for an excruciatingly slow exposé of how this sausage will be made. The banter here, reminiscent of the better Ocean’s Eleven sequels, keeps the mechanism well oiled, but it is still creaky. A few scenes amply illustrate the brutality of the Occupation, and sexual orientation works its way in: Lada is a lesbian and David, in addition to being a Jew, is gay—August Wolff’s closeted desire may be the only reason David has, so far, escaped the camps. The genuine pathos at the end of this overdetermined rainbow may be worth the wait.
A little-known story that will have special resonance for today’s resisters.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7783-0815-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
A contemporary equivalent of This Side of Paradise or Vile Bodies, and another solid building-block in one of contemporary...
A first US appearance of a novel originally published in 1987, this crisp portrayal of “flaming youth” in the late 1960s proves one of Murakami’s most appealing—if uncharacteristic—books.
Best known to us as the comic surrealist-symbolist author of such rousing postmodernist fare as A Wild Sheep Chase (1989), Murakami is also a highly intelligent romantic who feels the pangs of his protagonist Toru Watanabe’s insistent sexual and intellectual hungers and renders them with unsparing clarity (the matter-of-fact sexual frankness here seems unusual for a Japanese novel, even a 1987 one).Toru’s narrative of his student years, lived out against a backdrop of ongoing “campus riots,” focuses on the lessons he learns from relationships with several highly individual characters, two of them women he simultaneously loves (or thinks he loves). Mercurial Naoko, who clearly perceives the seeds of her own encroaching madness (“It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself”), continues to tug away at Toru’s emotions even after she enters a sanatorium. Meanwhile, coy fellow student Midori tries to dispel shadows cast by her parents’ painful deaths by fantasizing and simulating—though never actually experiencing—sex with him. Other perspectives on Toru’s hard-won assumption of maturity are offered by older student Nagasawa (“a secret reader of classic novels,” and a compulsive seducer); Naoko’s roommate Reiko, a music teacher (and self-styled interpreter of such Beatles’ songs as the one that provides Murakami’s evocative title) who’s perhaps also her lesbian lover; and the specter of Toru’s boyhood friend Kizuki, a teenaged suicide. There’s a lot of talk about books (particularly Fitzgerald’s and Hesse’s) and other cultural topics, in a blithely discursive and meditative story that’s nevertheless firmly anchored to the here and now by the vibrant immediacy of its closely observed characters and their quite credibly conflicted psyches and libidos.
A contemporary equivalent of This Side of Paradise or Vile Bodies, and another solid building-block in one of contemporary fiction’s most energetic and impressive bodies of work.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70402-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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