If Ingmar Bergman’s films are too cheerful for you, this is just the antidote.
Norwegian novelist Solstad delivers a grim exercise in modern literary existentialism.
Bjørn Hansen is 50 as this novel opens. He had left Oslo years before for the quiet country town of Kongsberg, the hometown of his lover, Turid Lammers, for whom he abandoned his wife and child. Now, having talked his way into the job of town treasurer by virtue of a college degree, he has left Turid, too. “This was how Bjørn Hansen’s existence had shaped up. This was his life. At Kongsberg. With Turid Lammers, this woman he had to live with because he feared he would otherwise regret everything,” writes Solstad. Turid’s sin? As director of the local theater company, she allowed Bjørn to deliver a disastrous performance in a production of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, a mirthless story perfectly at home in Bjørn’s sprawling library of similarly dour books: Kafka, Kierkegaard, Cela. Of The Family of Pascual Duarte, the brooding masterwork by the last writer, Bjørn intones, “Was it sombre enough? I mean, I liked the book, but did it go deeply enough, I mean deeply enough into my own existence?” Bjørn empties out his library when his forgotten son, Peter, bobs up to attend optometry school; Bjørn lets Peter stay in his home but steadily regrets the decision when he realizes Peter has no direction in life and is roundly disliked by his classmates. “Youths like Peter Korpi Hansen were ten a penny,” Bjørn grumbles. “All of them radiated the same intoxicating nonchalance, self-indulgence and idleness.” Like the similarly bookish Peter Kien of Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé, Bjørn, too, is an ostensibly influential man without purpose or power. Steered into an insurance scam by his drug-addicted doctor when he announces his intention to “actualise his No, his great Negation,” Bjørn surrenders his will as if glad to be rid of it. The philosophical implications are many, though it’s a bit of a slog through an essentially actionless plot to get at them.
If Ingmar Bergman’s films are too cheerful for you, this is just the antidote.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2826-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
IN THE NEWS
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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