by David Walton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 31, 2002
Disorganized in a way that’s intended to be appealing, though its combination of humanity and idea never quite melds.
Short moral debut novel about one man’s jaunts through an anti-Pittsburgh so close to an underground that it feels futuristic.
Ray has eschewed the academic set for a more focused and intimate association with real life: he helps clients from a Blind Center learn to use the bus system to get around in a cautionary urbanscape, as if he were “a transgender Dorothy leading his benighted band through this Oz of mundane reality.” As we move through this hectic, bleary world, we also move through Ray’s life, visiting his mother, hearing of his ex-wife, Arlene, occupying a kind of alter-city based on bus schedules and the unique topography of Pittsburgh, PA. Although the story begins on this interesting terrain, it soon executes a bus’s awkward three-point turn back to familiar territory: the adventures of writing instructors at the University of Pittsburgh, where Walton (stories: Waiting in Line, not reviewed) teaches. This puts it into the same category as Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys and, less directly, Chuck Kinder’s Honeymooners, though it isn’t quite as successful as either. Ray is soon attending parties of Pitt writing instructors, engaging in random sexual encounters with ex-colleagues of his ex-wife, having adventures not quite in keeping with what seemed to have gotten the book’s bus rolling in the first place. The vision is admirable, but Ray’s near obsession with bus schedules and routine stands in stark contrast to the overall structure of the narrative, whose ride is far more runaway and frenetic. The many references to Pittsburgh may become tiresome—unrecognizable to some, and an already-mined wellspring to others—but the final message is genuine: “ . . . all our journeys are chancy, but the intention to do good, like the intention to sin, is equal to the deed.”
Disorganized in a way that’s intended to be appealing, though its combination of humanity and idea never quite melds.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2002
ISBN: 0-88748-377-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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by Han Kang ; translated by Deborah Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2016
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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by Han Kang ; translated by Deborah Smith & Emily Yae Won
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by Han Kang translated by Deborah Smith
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