A profoundly moving collection on surviving stillness.
A stark collection of short stories from a Brazilian writer who creates specks of beauty with every stroke of the pen.
In Abreu’s collection of 18 stories, readers navigate through a Brazil lost in time, stuck in the impasse of tragedy, and gasping for air in a space void of it. In the opening story, “Dialogue,” Abreu sets a scene that determines the rest of the book. Two genderless interlocutors declare their friendship for one another in an ever revolving cycle of affection. Such is the binary that Abreu develops in all his stories: Two individuals struggle to find the words to identify their feelings, communicate with affect and sensations, and ultimately find peace in not knowing. Known for his often dizzying syntax and provocative imagery, Abreu writes with an ease that sticks and with an intention that triggers. “Too much culture kills people’s bodies, man, too many films, too many books, too many words, I could only consume you by masturbating, there was the entire Library of Alexandria keeping our bodies apart,” writes the narrator of “The Survivors.” Struggling through the surplus of material to make sense of their existence, Abreu’s characters prefer to put on a record, light up a cigarette, and watch time pass. “The room was still under that burgundy shade, dull, stagnant, with the old yellow cushion shining in the dark, strangely greenish now, in the blue streetlight. He gestured toward the telephone. He even took one step forward, as if he were about to go back. But he didn’t move.” They speak on the phone to their loved ones, they drink copiously, they dance, they sweat, they have sex, they die. Some might live their entire lives without looking beyond the cloud of cigarette smoke hovering directly in front of them. Some might collect funerals. Abreu remarkably captures a feeling that escapes definition, a proximity to death so palpable that the words scream its song. Abreu’s prose is still, rich, and full of time lost and time future.
A profoundly moving collection on surviving stillness.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953861-20-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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