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TÓMAS JÓNSSON, BESTSELLER

Name: TÓMAS JÓNSSON, BESTSELLER
Author: Gudbergur Bergsson
ISBN: 978-1-940953-60-1

by Gudbergur Bergsson ; translated by Lytton Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 2017

Nothing much happens on the surface of Bergsson’s yarn, but underneath there’s plenty of magma bubbling.

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A modernist classic from Iceland, half a century old, makes its first appearance in the U.S.

He’s a mean man, a sick man. And, though “descended from the bravest, bluest-eyed Vikings,” Tómas Jónsson doesn’t strike much of a heroic figure; old and fast falling apart, hidden away in a basement flat, he spends his time filling the pages of composition books with reflections, sometimes aphoristic and sometimes stream-of-consciousness floods, on the things he has seen and done. “I am completely bound to the passing moment,” he records. “I am the passing moment. I am time itself. I have no remarkable experiences. I have no spare moments from the past.” Ordinary though his experiences may have been in the larger human story, they’re enough to sustain an off-kilter, often dyspeptic worldview. First published in 1966, a decade after Halldór Laxness became the first and so far only Icelandic writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Bergsson’s novel has a Joycean quality to it, Finnegans Wake as much as Ulysses, with portraits of the artist as a man at various stages of life, all of them querulous. Jónsson frets that he cannot be a real writer because he lacks a callused pen finger, and that’s only the first of his strict attentions to the body and its functions, as when Bergsson via Jónsson describes a woman eating a boardinghouse meal even as other diners “de-wind themselves with a couple of farts”: “She put it in her mouth on the tines of her fork, her jaws swinging to and fro, bjabb-bjabb, as the steak mashes down her esophagus down to the stomach grog-grog.” It’s not the most appetizing of visions, but Bergsson’s shaggy (and, in a couple of instances, carefully shaven) dog stories have a certain weird charm, even as it develops that Jónsson has discovered one great raison d’être for writing a memoir: revenge.

Nothing much happens on the surface of Bergsson’s yarn, but underneath there’s plenty of magma bubbling.

Pub Date: July 11, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-940953-60-1

Page Count: 411

Publisher: Open Letter

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.