A cerebral elegy that demands patience, even from serious film lovers.
German author Kinsky’s spare, abstract fiction centers on a woman’s nostalgia for experiencing movies in a theater.
Like the iconoclastic filmmaker John Cassevetes, whom she quotes throughout, Kinsky avoids conventional plot structure and psychological probing. Her unnamed narrator spends pages describing the physical world, often as a vista of “flatness and vastness”—vastness being a favorite word—and musing about the relationship between image and memory, cinema as “vastness…bound to this physical place,” and the “communality of the cinematic experience.” Meanwhile, she reveals little about the emotional landscape of the people around her and shares only the barest details of her own story. As a child in an unnamed, probably Eastern European country (given that she studied Polish and Russian), she watches no television and only occasionally visits the cinema with her father, whose reticence is the only characteristic she mentions. As an adult, she takes photographs, but whether as a career or hobby isn’t clear. No intimate friends show up, only acquaintances. After years in London, described by the names of movie theaters she frequented, she moves to Budapest, where an elderly neighbor named Julika mentions that she once “had a fellow who was a great cinema man.” Traveling around southeast Hungary, the narrator finds a small town with an abandoned movie theater she decides to buy and restore after meeting its former projectionist and some other locals. At this point, Kinsky drops in an “interlude” telling the story of a young cinema enthusiast known as Laci who brings movies to his hometown during World War II with the help of a young woman named Julika; while their romance is half-baked and Julika eventually leaves, Laci’s lifelong obsession with cinema is passionate. The narrator takes up her own story again as she completes her restoration and attempts to reopen what had been Laci’s theater. Ultimately, sorrow bleeds through the narrator’s (and author’s) reserve, the decline of cinema epitomizing profound loss—of place, of beloved people (see the dedication at the end), of optimism.
A cerebral elegy that demands patience, even from serious film lovers.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781681378510
Page Count: 176
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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