A pleasure, as reading Jacobson always is—though much different from what we’ve come to expect, which is not at all a bad...
Jacobson (The Finkler Question, 2010, etc.), Britain’s answer to Philip Roth, returns with an enigmatic tale of the near future.
Imagine The Children of Men appearing under the name of Fran Lebowitz, and you’ll have some sense of the dislocation Jacobson’s move from angst-y comedy to dystopian darkness might cause. Not that Jacobson’s future is all bad: In fact, the coast of a land something like Wales or Cornwall is now peppered with places with names such as Port Reuben and home to people called Morvoren Steinberg and Esme Nussbaum, “an intelligent and enthusiastic thirty-two-year-old researcher employed by Ofnow, the non-statutory monitor of the Public Mood.” For once, it seems, Jews have found a refuge and are not being killed in it, even if they’re still not entirely at home there. Born into this world is Kevern Cohen, who, deeply in love with the alluring Ailinn Solomons, finds himself puzzling over why his father impulsively drew his fingers across his mouth whenever he began a word with the letter J. Does G-d not like those who honor him with names such as Jacob and Joseph? There’s a mystery afoot there, if one less pressing than such mysteries as who killed Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock, “found lying side by side in the back of Ythel Weinstock's caravan in pools of each other’s blood.” Who, indeed? Kevern’s got his work cut out for him, and though everyone’s ready to talk, no one’s ready to tell. The laughs come fewer and farther between than in Jacobson’s recent string of men-lost-in-middle-age yarns, which is not to say that his latest is without humor: When one local asks Kevern whether he knows the meaning of a dialect phrase, Kevern guesses something very not nice indeed, to which the local replies, “We’ll make a local of yerz yet. Go fuck yerzelf is spot on.”
A pleasure, as reading Jacobson always is—though much different from what we’ve come to expect, which is not at all a bad thing.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-553-41955-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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