Ethnic prose authentically rendered fails to congeal into a persuasive whole.
From Booker-winning Kelman (How Late It Was, How Late, 1994, etc.) comes a vividly written, if meandering, portrait of a Scottish immigrant to America on the eve of his first trip home in 12 years.
We meet Jeremiah Brown as he wanders through a snowbound American town in the West, headed vaguely in the direction of a bar. On the morrow he’ll fly home to Scotland, but for now he’s stranded and cold, on the lost end of a love he shared with Yasmin, a jazz singer and mother of his unnamed daughter. Brown finds a bar, settles in, and through spurts of paranoid theorizing about federal agents and Pentagon spies, tells us how he came to be in this place, waiting for the music to start. He recalls in scattershot fashion his wanderings from New York to Denver, San Francisco and Omaha and on to Las Vegas, his gigs as a bartender, a “Security Agent” of some kind at the Las Vegas airport, a mildly successful gambler, and a card dealer. He’s always dreamed of being a writer, but above all he’s adored Yasmin from the time of their first meeting. Yet in his melancholy recollections, she usually wanted little to do with him, resented his tagging along on her multistate singing tours, and submitted reluctantly to his lovemaking. It’s not clear whether Brown realizes how little Yasmin shared his adoration, but he’s definitely oblivious to the possibility that readers will be alienated by his coarse, sometimes bruising rhetoric, which skips nonsensically from anecdote to anecdote, tale to tale, theory to theory. Since this is not, to put it mildly, a plot-driven work, Brown’s first-person narration must be the engine that drives our interest, and that’s a problem. In addition, he’s so self-centered he offers little insight into the American immigrant experience.
Ethnic prose authentically rendered fails to congeal into a persuasive whole.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-101042-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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