A smart and understated collection that puts some new twists on old-fashioned identity crises.
A clutch of well-turned stories filled with characters concerned with the limits of their personalities.
“The Ballad of Rocky Rontal,” a brief, early story in Alarcón’s (City of Clowns, 2015, etc.) second collection, turns on a question that recurs throughout the book: what circumstances make us who we are, and how much can we change? Rocky grows up in an abusive home and murders a man as an adult, but after 32 years in prison he returns to a “world that’s disappointingly familiar,” and Alarcón is deliberately vague about how much he is (or can be) rehabilitated. Similarly, “República and Grau” turns on a 10-year-old boy who’s put to work by his father to help a blind man beg on the streets, playing with the question of how much looking like a beggar actually makes him one. And in the closing “The Auroras,” a man takes a one-year leave from his university job and stumbles into a relationship with a married woman; after lying about being a doctor, a host of other questions rises up about what he can make himself into (a violent person, for one), culminating in a twist ending that shows how liberating your sense of self can be a kind of entrapment. The tone throughout the stories is flat and nonjudgmental, though sometimes you can sense a smirk in Alarcón’s prose about the predicaments: in “The Bridge” a blind couple falls “steadily, lovingly, to [their] death[s]” off a bridge broken in an accident, and a man pretending to be his brother in “The Provincials” takes a detour into the format of a comic play. But the overall message is that we mess with our personalities at our peril.
A smart and understated collection that puts some new twists on old-fashioned identity crises.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59463-172-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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