“What would Anita Brookner do?” asks one of Mantel’s protagonists. The answer, we’d like to think, is this: She’d read...
Best known for historical novels such as Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring up the Bodies (2012), Mantel proves herself a skilled practitioner of short fiction as well.
“In those days, the doorbell didn’t ring often, and if it did I would draw back into the body of the house.” So opens the first story in Mantel’s slender collection. Like the title story, and indeed like several others, it has a certain claustrophobic, reticent feel to it, its protagonist a retiring type thrust into discomfort by the larger events at play in the street outside. All of the pieces are worthy of our attention, but the title story is a true tour de force: A house-proud suburbanite has a kitchen window that opens onto a view of a hospital where Margaret Thatcher, in 1983, has had eye surgery, and it is that kitchen window that an IRA sniper wishes to use in order to do the Iron Lady in. Or perhaps not the IRA; remarks the householder, “It crossed my mind then he might not be a Provisional, but from one of the mad splinter groups you heard of.” Can she dissuade the shooter? Will she come to take his view that it’s no crime to slay the killer of so many innocents? All will be revealed—but after a nice cup of tea, mind you. Mantel blows up very thin balloons by way of situations and then takes a needle to them: Another story concerns a case of misread intentions in an expat cloister in Saudi Arabia, one of its players described thus: “spiritless, freckled, limp, she was a faded redhead who seemed huddled into herself, unused to conversation.” You just know that great things aren’t going to come from her, and certainly not the history-changing murder of a world leader, just as most of Mantel’s characters are retiring, confused people without much of a clue but who muddle on all the same.
“What would Anita Brookner do?” asks one of Mantel’s protagonists. The answer, we’d like to think, is this: She’d read Mantel’s latest, and she’d delight in it.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62779-210-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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Multifaceted portraits of working women in Seoul reveal the importance of female friendships amid inequality.
A disturbing look at the unrealistic beauty standards placed on Korean women.
Cha's timely debut deftly explores the impact of impossible beauty standards and male-dominated family money on South Korean women. Kyuri, Miho, Ara, and Sujin are two sets of working-class roommates who befriend each other, and Wonna is a married woman who lives on a different floor of the same apartment complex in Seoul. All are struggling financially. As Wonna laments, "Unless you are born into a chaebol family or your parents were the fantastically lucky few who purchased land in Gangnam decades ago, you have to work and work and work for a salary that isn't even enough to buy a house...." Because of Kyuri's successful plastic surgeries, men hire her to be their companion at after-work "room salons," giving her an enviable stock of designer purses and spending money. Sujin is saving up for surgery to attain the same face as Kyuri, but Cha shows how all the women are impacted by these standards. Ara's work as a hairdresser makes her literally invested in part of the beauty industry, and even though artist Miho hopes her talent will allow her to rise on her own, she finds herself dependent on the whims of a wealthy boyfriend. At times, the voices of the many characters can blur and the timeline can be confusing. Wonna is the least developed character and interacts with the others only in a plot twist at the end of the book. However, taken together, Cha's empathetic portraits allow readers to see the impact of economic inequity, entrenched classism, and patriarchy on her hard-working characters' lives. Cha grew up in the United States, South Korea, and Hong Kong and is a former Seoul-based culture and travel editor for CNN.
Multifaceted portraits of working women in Seoul reveal the importance of female friendships amid inequality.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-12946-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Two lessons: Don’t discount a woman just because she’s made of clay, and consider your wishes carefully should you find that...
Can’t we all just get along? Perhaps yes, if we’re supernatural beings from one side or another of the Jewish-Arab divide.
In her debut novel, Wecker begins with a juicy premise: At the dawn of the 20th century, the shtetls of Europe and half of “Greater Syria” are emptying out, their residents bound for New York or Chicago or Detroit. One aspirant, “a Prussian Jew from Konin, a bustling town to the south of Danzig,” is an unpleasant sort, a bit of a bully, arrogant, unattractive, but with enough loose gelt in his pocket to commission a rabbi-without-a-portfolio to build him an idol with feet of clay—and everything else of clay, too. The rabbi, Shaalman, warns that the ensuing golem—in Wecker’s tale, The Golem—is meant to be a slave and “not for the pleasures of a bed,” but he creates her anyway. She lands in Manhattan with less destructive force than Godzilla hit Tokyo, but even so, she cuts a strange figure. So does Ahmad, another slave bottled up—literally—and shipped across the water to a New York slum called Little Syria, where a lucky Lebanese tinsmith named Boutros Arbeely rubs a magic flask in just the right way and—shazam!—the jinni (genie) appears. Ahmad is generally ticked off by events, while The Golem is burdened with the “instinct to be of use.” Naturally, their paths cross, the most unnatural of the unnaturalized citizens of Lower Manhattan—and great adventures ensue, for Shaalman is in the wings, as is a shadowy character who means no good when he catches wind of the supernatural powers to be harnessed. Wecker takes the premise and runs with it, and though her story runs on too long for what is in essence a fairy tale, she writes skillfully, nicely evoking the layers of alienness that fall upon strangers in a strange land.
Two lessons: Don’t discount a woman just because she’s made of clay, and consider your wishes carefully should you find that magic lamp.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-211083-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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