The late Czech novelist, both banned and renowned in his homeland, offers a uniquely compelling blend of parable, fantasy, social realism and testament to the power of storytelling.
Originally issued in 1981 and belatedly translated into English, this novel (by the author of I Served the King of England, 1971, etc.) offers stream-of-consciousness narration by an unnamed woman in her mid-60s who lives with her husband and uncle in a castle that has been converted into an old-age home. Much of what she writes is memory, some is description of her daily activities, much of it might be illusion. Wafting through the air is the romantic, string-laden musical composition that gives the book its title, a timeless reverie that is omnipresent though some may not acknowledge or even hear it. She shares the stories of others, witnesses to a distant past, and she sees what they do: “I saw there what could no longer be seen, but what my friends and I did see, those old witnesses to old times, of which I myself was now one.” Though each chapter is a single paragraph, with some very long sentences, the voice of the narrator is spellbinding, even as the reader becomes less sure of her credibility. Beyond that voice, there isn’t much of a plot except the decline toward death that is everyone’s plot. She tells of her life in “the little town where time stood still,” where her husband ran the brewery and she was the envy of the other women. “Yes, it was a good thing I’d been so proud, that I’d stayed so young and pretty for so long,” she says, leaving the reader to wonder whether it really was a good thing or if she really was as pretty as she remembered. Time really hadn’t stood still: Communism cost her husband the brewery and the two of them their home, amid “huge parades that raise their fist at everything old.” As she reflects, “[w]hat is life? Everything that once was, everything an old person thinks back on and tells you stories about, everything that no longer matters and is gone for good.”
An enchanting novel, full of life, about the end of life.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-981955-73-5
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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