Sensual talespinning: often evocative and involving, if a bit precious.
Seven sisters run a bakery after their mother’s death and father’s disappearance—in a Dutch family saga that edges toward magical realism.
Emma, raised in post–WWII rural Holland by her six aunts, her mother, and Oma, who takes the role of Grandmother although her literal relationship remains unclear, is 13 when the father she’s never known shows up in the bakery to die. Suddenly curious about her own upbringing, Emma begins to question her family, and the sisters’ history unfolds. Devout but far from conventional Catholics, the sisters are bound together despite shifting affections and loyalties. When only a teenager, Emma’s mother Martha, the oldest sister, takes over the bakery and care of her sisters. Her husband Sebastian moves into the bakery but leaves when Emma is an infant, unable to handle the household of women. The other sisters’ love lives are no happier; no man can compete with the power of their combined femininity. Fragile Marie waits seven years to marry, then returns home weeks later without comment and eventually becomes a nun. Warmhearted Christina, who is more of a mother to Emma than Martha herself, finds a wonderful loving husband, but he dies soon after the wedding. Tomboy Vincente is tricked by a scam artist. Dreamy Clara falls in love with sex, while her twin sister Camilla is forbidden to marry the hunchbacked neighbor who dies trying to cure himself at Lourdes. After Oma dies, she returns as a spirit/ghost/vision to teach Emma how to make sauerkraut and give general advice. Although they wander from the bakery, eventually the sisters end up together again, more united than ever when their long-lost father’s widow shows up (as the Oma spirit has warned) and claims ownership of the bakery. Even Emma, despite marriage and the birth of a son, is unable to escape the bakery’s spell.
Sensual talespinning: often evocative and involving, if a bit precious.Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2002
ISBN: 0-688-17070-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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