Some readers will love Nettel's penetrating gaze while others may wish it were aimed at subjects less scatological.
In this slight collection of stories, first published in Spanish in 2008, the Mexican writer Nettel (After the Winter, 2018, etc.) plumbs the depths of human perversion.
One character haunts restaurant toilets, becoming obsessed with a strange woman simply based on the smell of her poo ("Petals"); another peeps on her neighbor, getting a voyeuristic thrill from watching him masturbate while his date sits in another room ("Through Shades"); a third character can't give up her obsessive-compulsive tendency to pluck hair from all over her body, even when it costs her intimacy ("Bezoar"). Too often, weirdness feels overdetermined in these stories, as though the point is to see what happens when you reduce a person to one disgusting habit or strange passion. Still, there are some successes: In "Bonsai," the narrator's secret obsession with a garden is a useful vehicle to explore how keeping secrets can be estranging. The husband's weekly visits to the greenhouse, which his wife once loved, persuade him that he's a cactus and she's a climbing vine, two plants that are too different to live together. While Nettel's odd characters unnerve, her insights are nervy and occasionally brilliant. Describing her mother's fear of dying, one character says, "When your mother is afraid it's as if suddenly she can no longer feed you, as if, right this minute, she'd take her breast out of your mouth." Or as the narrator of "Bezoar" observes about her mania: "When one has allowed oneself to be controlled for so long by actions one does not recognize as one's own...when one has loosened the sphincter of one's willpower...one knows even less if one's actions could be considered ‘irresponsible.’ "
Some readers will love Nettel's penetrating gaze while others may wish it were aimed at subjects less scatological.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60980-958-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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