The experimental form cannot, however, distract from the lucidity of Sonnenberg’s prose, which is notable for its stark...
A tapestry of settings and voices speaks of dislocation and grief in Sonnenberg’s ambitious debut.
Multiple narrators—both human and inanimate—relate the story of the Kriegstein family: father Chris, who escaped Midwestern dreariness for corporate stardom; mother Elise, whose genteel Southern childhood ended abruptly with her grandfather’s abuse; and their daughters, Leah and Sophie. Elise’s childhood home bemoans the desolation of losing its last resident, Elise’s elderly mother, Ada, to a nursing home—and the rift that arose when Ada accused Elise of “telling tales” about her grandfather. Chris’ parents, reluctant assisted living residents, comment on their son’s distance—emotional and geographical. From there, the narrators and points of view proliferate, ranging from deeply interior to collective and omniscient. During the first of Chris’ many international postings, to Hamburg, Germany, Elise, pregnant with Leah, blunders into a bizarre winter picnic with strangers, perhaps intended to symbolize her own frozen family life, past and future. Back in the States, left alone as Chris travels, Elise is unable to muster motherly feelings for baby Leah. As teens, negotiating a difficult adjustment to life in Shanghai, Leah and Sophie are most comfortable when they can escape the expat country club and American School for summer “home leaves” with their grandparents. Early on, visits to a family therapist, presented as scenes from a play, reveal that Sophie has died suddenly—though she is still very much present, especially to Leah. Sonnenberg is particularly adept at portraying the conflicting and ambivalent feelings associated with grief: anguish, guilt, even relief (on Leah’s part) that she no longer has to compete with her blonde, athletic younger sibling for her parents’ or boys’ attention. Since the nuclear Kriegstein family is the main focus, chapters featuring peripheral characters, though intriguing in themselves, serve only to distract.
The experimental form cannot, however, distract from the lucidity of Sonnenberg’s prose, which is notable for its stark honesty and sharply observed details.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-4834-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
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.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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