Here, indeed, is a story: brilliant, high, fine, masterful, deep—whether or not there remains an audience capable of...
Those who adored experimentalist Markson’s previous two outings (Reader’s Block, 1996; This Is Not a Novel, 2001) will be ecstatic anew as the writer keeps up his near-single-handed effort to keep American prose fiction significant, deep, and subtle.
Here is another booklength collection of facts, statements, and—like planted surprises—questions, the whole arranged in a breathtakingly seamless perfection by “Author,” who has put “the notes on three-by-five inch index cards” and at last “is pretty sure that most of them are basically in the sequence that he wants.” And what a sequence it is. Comic, bathetic, pathetic, wrenching, matter-of-fact (“Bach had twenty children, of whom nine survived him”), the entries manage to tell a story—of humanity and humanity’s desires, if you will—without ever once straining to do so, or at least without ever once showing the strain. “The first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species sold out in one day,” we learn, and, later, “Baltimore, Edgar Allen Poe died in.” The result of Markson’s immersion in these and many other such facts, and of his ineluctably perfect marshalling of them, is a kind of mini-epic—small in proportion and therefore appropriate to our own paltry, lost, uninformed, and diminished age—of Western humanity’s long ambition toward the attainment of art, permanence, beauty, and meaning, all implicitly doomed by the pervasive banality and pseudo-bathos that we’ve degenerated into in our own day: a situation requiring that the tale now be told not in the broad strokes of real epic, but in the quietly understated, guarded, cautious, brilliantly organized yet unobtrusive listing of facts, queries, and assertions that Markson provides—ranging from “a terminal desolation and despair” to the plain fact that “Ravenna, Dante died in,” or “Brundisium, Virgil.” “The ways we miss our lives are life,” we read, wondering whether Author himself penned these words. Then, more sad than is imaginable: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story. Said Isak Dinesen.”
Here, indeed, is a story: brilliant, high, fine, masterful, deep—whether or not there remains an audience capable of embracing it.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2004
ISBN: 1-59376-010-8
Page Count: 191
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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