Rosner offers a gentle meditation on love and loss: "Rivers, oceans, the passing of molecules back and forth, darkness into...
Rosner (Blue Nude, 2006, etc.) draws on the immigrant experience of Charles Porteus Steinmetz, the Wizard of Schenectady, as the background to a coming-of-age novel.
The novel starts off in 1919 exploring Steinmetz's work at "The Company" in Electric City (think General Electric in Schenectady) and the great scientist’s friendship with Joseph Longboat, a Mohawk. Later, the story takes up the lives of Sophie Levine, Henry Van Curler, and Martin Longboat, Joseph's grandson. Sophie’s parents escaped from Holland, their families consumed by the Holocaust. Henry, surviving scion of the region’s first settlers, copes with disconnected parents grieving the accidental death of an older son. Martin, like his grandfather, is a gentle soul attuned to nature. In 1965, the three are approaching the end of their high school years. An unlikely romance begins between Sophie and Henry. That love doesn’t shut out Martin, but he "had no idea what to offer when a girl aimed her heart away from him." Later, as the three lark about ice skating, Henry falls through the ice and drowns. Sophie and Martin each suffer differently. "Losses were the exact size of sorrows left unspoken." With deft descriptions, Rosner sketches the bustling city, on land long cherished by aboriginal culture, which grew and flourished as whites invaded and industrialized. The narrative is woven through with symbolic allusions; for instance, the characters' personal losses are mirrored by the physical decline of the once-vibrant city after bottom line–obsessed managers begin sending jobs overseas—"Electric City was being disconnected, unplugged from its own socket." Rosner’s best work, however, is developing the characters of the three young people—Henry, tentative, suppressed, dead before he had a chance to flourish; Sophie, gutted by Henry’s death, turning every energy to the study of medicine; and Martin, haunted by the oppression of his people and choosing Canada over the Vietnam draft.
Rosner offers a gentle meditation on love and loss: "Rivers, oceans, the passing of molecules back and forth, darkness into brilliance and then gone."Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 9781619023468
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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