Ransmayr's first novel, originally published in 1984 in Germany, is released now in the US after his second novel and American debut, The Last World (1990). As in The Last World, Ransmayr here depicts a journey to the edge of the known globe. Where Last World took the form of a search for Ovid out into the hinterlands of classical civilization, Terrors follows a narrator to the North Pole, the last unconquered territory of 20th-century exploration. Ransmayr's narrator becomes fascinated with Josef Mazzini, a missing author who enjoys ``playing a game with reality'' in his writing: after he has written an adventure story, he does historical research to see whether it has a precedent, convinced that whatever he fantasizes about must have happened in the past. Mazzini has become obsessed with the North Pole and seems to have found ``proof'' of his fantasy of an exploration there in the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition of 1872. Absorbed by a journal from the 1872 adventure, Mazzini sets out for the region himself, never to return. Perplexed by the disappearance of Mazzini, Ransmayr's narrator is drawn into the lore of North Pole expeditions. Unfortunately, neither Mazzini nor his overseeing narrator actually does much above the level of extended musings and historical homework. Of course the trip Mazzini makes is primarily a psychological one, but his personality, along with that of the narrator, is so thinly defined that Terrors fails to charge up a sustained inquiry into a complex psychic state. For all the internal gadgetry, Ransmayr's story fails to circumnavigate a single, compelling character. In the end, a chilly academic exercise.
Pub Date: July 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8021-1152-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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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/Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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