An ambitious effort that, despite its imperfections, will keep readers riveted.
Kirby’s assured debut depicts the travails of a displaced daughter in Victorian England.
Born to Mary Burns, a prisoner in Birmingham Gaol, infant Cora Burns is consigned to the local workhouse. She grows up there, makes one friend, Alice Salt, and excels at school, but then Alice drives her to commit a terrible crime. Her youth excuses her from prosecution, and at 16, Cora is sent to work at a nearby asylum, not knowing her mother is committed there. Like her mother, Cora has a child out of wedlock and is confined in Birmingham Gaol. Her child is also removed by authorities. This is only one of many parallels in Kirby’s multilayered narrative of grim coincidence, origin mysteries, and severed pairs, symbolized by the half medal Cora wears around her neck. Cora is determined and resourceful due to the hardships of her upbringing, but she is also capable of rage, which she mostly keeps contained—except on those unpredictable occasions when she doesn’t. Thomas Jerwood, the master of the house where Cora, upon release, is referred as a housemaid, is an amateur scientist whose treatises on nature and nurture appear every few chapters. Mrs. Jerwood is a bedridden madwoman who, when she spots Cora, upbraids her by another name, Annie. Meanwhile, Dr. Farley, resident physician at the asylum, is attempting to treat Mary Burns with hypnotherapy. His scientific observations are also interspersed in the narrative. Jerwood’s young ward (and guinea pig), Violet, befriends Cora but at times seems unusually distant, her appearance and accent slightly altered. The convoluted plot promises a thematic bombshell that never drops, although a Marxist gloss is attempted. Kirby makes no concessions to sentimentality even at the risk of alienating readers with an unappealing protagonist: Cora’s personality approaches the sociopathic as she guiltlessly exploits those around her. Still, the language is atmospheric and perfectly pitched, and the dialogue is spare and evocative.
An ambitious effort that, despite its imperfections, will keep readers riveted.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-945814-84-6
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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