The love story takes second place to an operatic, chest-beating, stylish, but overstated exploration of place and...
A run-down European hotel, now being restored by its new Chinese owner, becomes the temporary home of a Dutch writer recording memories of “love in times of mass tourism.”
Prolific Dutch poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist Pfeijffer delivers an epic new work featuring Leonard Pfeijffer, “an esteemed and popular writer,” who offers an account of his time with Clio, “the love of my life [who] isn’t my love any more.” Recollections of this intense, lusty Italian affair form a plotline that is sandwiched between the additional meat of the book—a disquisition on Europe, its history, significance, and decline under assault from tourists. Clio is an art historian whose work lends perspective to the view that Europe’s greatness is all in its past. The fictional Pfeijffer is writing a novel on the subject of tourism, setting up a hall of mirrors concerning fact and fiction. But the insistent, multifaceted focus on the continent and its identity, and the meanings and truths to be found therein—financial, philosophical, political, creative, and more—merge into a relentless drumbeat of a message, with every subtopic, whether Clio’s interest in a lost Caravaggio or visits made to Malta, Genoa, Amsterdam, or Abu Dhabi, expanding on or threading back to the thesis. Europe is in the business of selling its past to tourists, a “barbarian invasion” that is wringing “the neck of three thousand years of European culture”; “You could describe the history of Europe as a history of longing for history”; “Europe has become a prisoner of its own past”; and so on. Meanwhile, the eponymous, once-magnificent hotel rolls forward as a metaphor for all of the above, with its aging European clientele; its refugee bellboy, Abdul (representing the immediacy and potential of immigration); and its new owner applying fresh, globally inspired layers of profitable nostalgia. Pfeijffer’s voice is variously comic, tragic, knowledgeable, inspired, and obsessive as he rides his hobbyhorse of a subject to a forced but characteristically elegant conclusion.
The love story takes second place to an operatic, chest-beating, stylish, but overstated exploration of place and perspective.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-16590-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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