Disturbing and unnerving but ultimately beautiful.
Irish author Ryan's debut takes readers to the “heart” of hardscrabble life in Ireland in the era after the economic boom and bust of 2008. The novel received Book of the Year honors at the Irish Book Awards.
Reminiscent of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, this book gives readers a story—or rather stories—told from multiple perspectives, each chapter using a different voice. The initial encounter is with Bobby Mahon, a builder who’s been burned by the economic machinations of Pokey Burke. Bobby is married to Triona and is generally looked up to by everyone as an honest man, showing rare integrity in a world of rascals and swindlers. Later, we find out that he had been having an affair with Réaltín, though Triona was so in love that his peccadillos didn’t matter. At the core of Bobby’s existence is his hatred for his father, a man who frittered away the family inheritance and constantly belittled his son. Through other characters later in the novel, readers find out that Bobby has supposedly murdered the old man. Is it true? The composite picture from these memories and anecdotes is bleak indeed. Readers learn of Réaltín’s groping by her egregious boss; Timmy’s having been flattened by a shovel by an irate victim of Pokey’s real estate fraud; Seanie Shaper’s constant desire for women; a reminiscence from beyond the grave by Bobby’s father; and finally there's Triona’s calm, earth-mother voice and a moving meditation that ends, “What matters only love?”
Disturbing and unnerving but ultimately beautiful.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-58642-224-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Welcome and surprising proof that there’s plenty of life in end-of-the-world storytelling.
A harrowing and fully imagined vision of dystopian America from Lee, who heretofore has worked in a more realist mode.
Lee’s oeuvre is largely made up of novels about Asians assimilating into American society (The Surrendered, 2010, etc.), and in many regards, this one is no different. Its hero is Fan, a young woman of Chinese descent who leaves her native Baltimore to find her disappeared lover, Reg. However, the near-future America she travels through is catastrophically going off the rails: The wealthy (or “Charters”) live in protected communities, the lawless “counties” are highly dangerous, while those like Fan in the struggling middle live and work in highly regimented communities designed to serve the Charters’ needs. (Fan worked in a fishery in Baltimore, renamed B-Mor.) Typical of dystopian literary novels, the circumstances that brought the country to this ugly pass aren’t clear (though social concerns about the environment and carcinogens are high). What Lee adds to the genre is his graceful, observant writing, as well as a remarkably well-thought-out sense of how crisis stratifies society and collapses morality. As Fan travels north from B-Mor, she encounters or hears about people who are actively brokering or sacrificing human life to survive. Lee’s imagination here is at once gruesome and persuasive: A family of circus-type performers who kill people and feed them to their dogs, a cloistered Charter housewife with a group of adopted children who are never allowed to leave their rooms, a doctor who accepts poor patients only to the extent they’re willing to prostitute themselves to him. The potency and strangeness of these characters never diminish the sense that Lee has written an allegory of our current predicaments, and the narration, written in the collective voice of B-Mor, gives the novel the tone of a timeless and cautionary fable.
Welcome and surprising proof that there’s plenty of life in end-of-the-world storytelling.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59448-610-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Searing fiction with the lived-in feel of the best memoir.
A torturer-in-hiding examined from multiple angles by family and victims.
In this third novel from Danticat (The Farming of Bones, 1998, etc.), the past has a way of intruding on everyday life no matter how all of the characters try to stop it. Of course, when the past is as horrific as it is here, that should come as no surprise. The title comes from a Haitian term for torturer, the black-hearted Tonton Macoutes who enforced the Duvalier regime (“ ‘They’d also come before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves, and they’d take you away’ ”). The particular dew breaker at the heart of this story is an old man when we first meet him, on a trip he’s taking with his artist daughter down to Florida to deliver a sculpture she’d been commissioned to make by a famous Haitian-American actress. Each chapter brings another view of this same man, who escaped his crimes in Haiti to hide out as a barber in Brooklyn, and each is related by different people who knew him—his wife, a lover, one of his victims. The structure, however, isn’t necessarily one of slowly revealed mystery, an approach that could have cheapened the tale’s formidable emotional impact. Even though we learn more and more about the dew breaker as the story progresses—and by the end have been firsthand witnesses to his foul methods—Danticat seems ultimately less interested in him than in those around him, those who speak personally about the suffering he caused. It’s a wise choice, in that there is comparatively little that can be learned from practitioners of evil, whose motives usually come down to simple desires for money or power. Danticat’s voice is that of a seasoned veteran, her pages wise and saddened, struggling on “the pendulum between regret and forgiveness.”
Searing fiction with the lived-in feel of the best memoir.Pub Date: March 15, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4114-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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