An engaging and surprising tale of transformation, told in almost allegorical form, perfect for fans of second chances and...
A middle-aged man travels from Iceland to an unnamed, war-torn country with plans of committing suicide.
Jónas Ebeneser has recently discovered that his adult daughter, Waterlily, is not his biological child. Considering his recently dissolved marriage and his lack of biological connection to his daughter, Jónas decides he has little left to live for. He begins planning his suicide but gets held up by logistics. First, he worries that disposing of his personal belongings will prove emotionally taxing for his daughter, so he begins emptying his home of his personal effects. Next, he concludes that his daughter should not be the one to find his body. So instead of shooting himself at home, Jónas decides to simply go away, disappear. He buys a plane ticket to a country that has just emerged from a devastating war on its own soil. Reserving a room at the mysterious Hotel Silence, he brings only one change of clothes, his diaries, and a tool box, in case affixing a hook to the ceiling might hasten his journey toward death. Ravaged by land mines, violence, and loss, the area surrounding Hotel Silence is a wasteland of dust and desperation. Jónas can’t help but notice the hotel’s glaring state of disrepair, and he begins using his tools to make small improvements, tightening a screw here, unclogging water pipes there. Word of Jónas’ handy nature spreads quickly, and he is suddenly being asked by all manner of folk to makes repairs for them in their homes and places of business around town. With so many men lost in the recent war, Jónas is treated as though he’s the only handyman in the entire country. People can’t get enough of him, and Jónas begins to wonder if he has found a new home. Told in surreal, almost Kafkaesque prose, Ólafsdóttir’s (Butterflies in November, 2014, etc.) stunning story is about one man’s unexpected reawakening.
An engaging and surprising tale of transformation, told in almost allegorical form, perfect for fans of second chances and evolving perspectives.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2750-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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