A philosophical jewel seeking revelation in interstices, absences, ruptures, and the passages between existence and memory.
Poetic and painterly, a meticulously observed contemplation of the world that was, the world that is, and the world that might have been and the boundaries that join and define them.
Following the death of her partner, known only as "M.," an unnamed narrator travels to Italy, where she briefly settles among the muted rhythms of a small town nestled in the hills surrounding Rome. Able to approach this loss only obliquely, her mourning takes the form of meditative walks, deep immersion in memories and dreams, and explorations of strangers' gravesites in cemeteries to which she has no connection, a habit instilled by her late father during their travels through Italy in her childhood. Her father was a German speaker whose bond to Italy was formed at the borderland of cultures, through his affinity for its language, art, and history. This he passed on to her as well, and she retraces these earlier journeys and embarks on new discoveries, her thoughts unfurling slowly across the landscape, rising and falling with the hills of Lazio. Light and shadow, color and shape, time and distance shift vertiginously according to her vantage point and the scope of her focus, which dilates from minutest detail to sweeping panorama, then narrows again; her sense of place within the landscape and the wider world alters, too, with each change in perspective, suggesting that how one sees is at least as important as what one sees. Ancient Etruscan necropolises and the untended graves of the long dead speak to the persistence of presence even through the absence of anyone left to remember, as symbols continue to signify where no one exists to decipher their meaning. As she wanders unhurried on the perpetual threshold of spring, the observed nesting upon the remembered upon the fictive realities of literature and film, the narrator bestows equal care and attention on rusted-out construction materials and blowing trash as on blooming mimosas and elegant herons in the marshland around Ferrara, where she contemplates the works of Giorgio Bassani and the great palimpsest that is Italy. Here at last she untangles the question central to her explorations of memory and place: whether she belongs to the side of the vii, the living, or of the morţi, the dead.
A philosophical jewel seeking revelation in interstices, absences, ruptures, and the passages between existence and memory.Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-945492-38-9
Page Count: 287
Publisher: Transit Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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