A shaky idea turns out wonderfully well.
Novelist/rock musician/West Coast disc-jockey Kihn (Big Rock Beat, 1996, etc.) assembles an anthology of short fiction by fellow rockers.
The sheaf kicks off with Kinky Friedman’s amusing “Don’t Forget,” about rock stars and poets who belonged in wig city (mental hospitals)—and yet actually made the grade, as did the “perfectly sane” narrator. There’s also a winning excerpt from Larry Kirwan’s forthcoming novel about the Beatles-as-if-they’d-never-made-it-as-chart-toppers, Liverpool Fantasy (p. 560). The people upstairs at Parlaphone have no faith in “Please Please Me” and think the Beatles’ first single should be “Till There Was You.” Kihn himself is now working on a Beatles novel, Rubber Soul. His tragic “Mirror Gazing with Brian Jones” tells of accompanying the multitalented Rolling Stones guitarist to Tangiers and into the Rif mountains to record the Master Musicians of Jajouka, whose music is four thousand years old. Country blues guitarist Scott Earle chooses “A Eulogy of Sorts” from his collection Doghouse Roses, about the death of a dope fiend. Ray Manzarek, founding member and keyboardist for the Doors, who’s written a novel as well as his autobiography, Light My Fire, pens “The Lady of the Valley,” telling of a mystical woman who appears to young Estaban during heavy summer heat and shows him how the light of Eden still shines with the first warmth of man in the Napa Valley. Ray Davies, songwriter, guitarist and lead singer for Britain’s the Kinks, who has written three story collections and his autobiography, X-Ray, offers “A Little Bit of Abuse,” from his collection Waterloo Sunset, while Pamela Des Barres, well-reviewed here for her Groupie confessional I’m with the Band, reveals all in “The James Dean Diaries.”
A shaky idea turns out wonderfully well.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56025-453-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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