MY NAME IS SEI SHONAGON

Name: MY NAME IS SEI SHONAGON
Author: Jan Blensdorf
ISBN: 1-58567-443-5

by Jan Blensdorf ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2003

Meditations and mini-essays about the delights and drawbacks of all things Japanese are interwoven throughout, providing...

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Australian journalist Blensdorf, now England-based, debuts with an overwrought melodrama about the beleaguered life and long identity crisis of a woman half-Japanese and half-American.

So much could have been so wonderful if our narrator’s imaginative and likable American father hadn’t died in New York “one evening as a stolen car shot out of the darkness.” His death leaves the little girl and her modest Japanese mother at the mercy of his parents: the grandfather is nice enough, but the grandmother is a crushing snob who scorns the mother and wants only to Americanize the girl a.s.a.p. Result: the two flee back to Tokyo to live with “my mother’s elder brother.” So much could have been so wonderful if only the unmarried uncle weren’t an intolerable, cruel, perverted male-supremacist brute (he’s obsessed by samurai swords) who drives his sister to suicide, whereafter he does something equally unspeakable to our poor girl narrator. And so much could have been so wonderful if only the narrator’s new husband hadn’t turned out to be—well, a brute and slug. Her shameful divorce alienates her enraged uncle forever—but our narrator inherits a little incense shop and, in its quiet upstairs room, sits behind a screen and listens to the sad stories of her male “clients,” then gives such spoken comfort and advice as she can. (The real Sei Shonagon was a courtier in the Heian period who, when she was given paper as a gift, used it to write The Pillow Book, circa a.d.1000). What at last seems true happiness—with the love of French photographer Alain—ends up, thanks again to brute villainy, to be something worse than any of the deaths, suicides, rapes, or divorces so far.

Meditations and mini-essays about the delights and drawbacks of all things Japanese are interwoven throughout, providing much ethnic and historic and cultural information. But, as fiction, Voices is slow going, the melodrama unrelieved (and unbelievable), the message a toss-up between the heavy-handed and the saccharine.

Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2003

ISBN: 1-58567-443-5

Page Count: 158

Publisher: Overlook

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE RECOGNITIONS

by William Gaddis ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 1955

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This overlong (946 pages) and rather pretentious first novel concerns itself with the impasse of the modern intellectual, living in a world where everyone wears a false face of one kind or another, wanting to believe in something, and "knowing" too much to have faith in anything. The scene is Spain, Rome and Paris in Europe, New York City (mainly Greenwich Village) and a New England town in the United States, and at moments an unnamed Central American Republic. The characters, and they multiply- since Mr. Gaddis has tried to write a "novel without a hero", range from hipsters and homosexuals to spoiled Catholics and Puritans to aimless pseudo-intellectuals, town drunkards, and religious fanatics. In what is also a novel without a defined plot, the most interesting parts concern Wyatt Gwyon, as his various activities take him from forging old masters in New York to Spain where he attempts to find some kind of truth; and his father, a New England minister who converts himself to Mithraism- sun worship. But the main fault of the novel is a complete lack of discipline. Gaddis writes with ease and vigor about a Greenwich Village gathering, but repeats this sequence many times. He knows many odd facts about ancient religious and he injects them all. He is familiar with many languages, and there are passages in Spanish, Italian, French, German, Latin and even Hungarian. It is a pity that, in his first novel, he did not have stronger editorial guidance than is apparent in the book for he can write very well- even though most of the time he just lets his pen run on.

Pub Date: March 10, 1955

ISBN: 1564786919

Page Count: 976

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1955

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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LAST COUPLE STANDING

by Matthew Norman ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

A quick-witted and ultimately hopeful look at what it takes to make a marriage last.

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A couple decides to save their relationship by attempting an open marriage.

Jessica and Mitch Butler have a happy marriage. Well, happy enough. Married for years with two children, it’s inevitable that they won’t feel the swells of passion every day, right? But when their three best couple friends get divorced around the same time, Jessica and Mitch start to reevaluate things. They thought their friends’ marriages were fine, but something tore them all apart. And, naturally, Jessica and Mitch start to wonder if the same thing could happen to them. So, to stave off the divorce that now seems inevitable, they try something dramatic: an open marriage. More specifically, an “evolved” marriage, one that allows each of them to have sex with other people, with several rules in place (no repeats, no one they know, etc.). Jessica immediately hits it off with a young, sexy bartender who sweeps her off her feet, but Mitch has more trouble connecting with women. And both of them realize, with help from their divorced friends, that dating is a lot different now that apps are on the scene. Although Jessica and Mitch’s plan may be a bit out of the box, their relationship and feelings are believable. Norman (We’re All Damaged, 2016, etc.) also creates a plethora of rounded, quirky side characters, including Jessica’s teenage therapy patient Scarlett and Mitch’s nerdy student Luke. When all of those characters come together in the story’s climax, the result is a scene worthy of a Shakespearean comedy.

A quick-witted and ultimately hopeful look at what it takes to make a marriage last.