Lovely and lyrical—a celebration of language and another virtuoso performance from a writer who does indeed deserve to be...
Elegant, lapidary stories that beg Ann Patchett’s question in the introduction: “Why isn’t Edith Pearlman famous?”
Pearlman (Love Among the Greats, 2002, etc.) is a master of the form, without doubt, though, like V.S. Pritchett, with whom she shares several points in common, there is nothing at all flashy about her fictions. Her stories are lush, at least as compared to the aridities of all those Raymond Carver–inspired tales of the last quarter-century, and they range the world in search of reports about the human condition. Often Pearlman writes of misplaced and displaced people, whether Jewish refugees from World War II–era Europe or characters who aren’t comfortable inside their own skins; often her characters can barely communicate, mistrustful of and limited by language (“On the fourth Thursday in August the youngest grandchild at last deigned to speak the language she had long understood, and demanded, in grammatical English, to be taken with the other kids to a traveling carnival”); it’s not uncommon for one of Pearlman’s players to be reaching for a dictionary somewhere along the way. Pearlman’s characters, too, are often layered in symbolism without being mere ciphers, as with the protagonist of “The Noncombatant,” a note-perfect evocation of the moment Americans on the home front learn that the war in the Pacific has ended—which does not mean, not by any stretch, that the goddess Eris has left the earth (“He felt his dying staunched by her wrath, her passionate unsubmissiveness”). Most of these stories are earnest, often even grim, though Pearlman is not without a sense of humor that mostly manifests in giving taunting names (“the Sisters Scrabble and the geezer”) to some of her foils. But humor is not what these stories are about; instead, Pearlman favors the startling moral problem (what should we think of a travel writer who does not travel, but invents places?) and the poetic meditation on family history and the passage of time.
Lovely and lyrical—a celebration of language and another virtuoso performance from a writer who does indeed deserve to be better known.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9823382-9-2
Page Count: 375
Publisher: Lookout Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
IN THE NEWS
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland(1992) to An Officer and a Spy(2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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