This tale of a madness as terrifying as it is logical, simple and classical in its tragic lines, is also a complex rendering...
An embittered young woman journeys to a small island in the Scottish Hebrides to confront her past, by murdering the mother who abandoned her as a newborn, in Rogers's brooding, furiously powerful tale (Mr. Wroe’s Virgins, 1999, etc.).
She calls herself Nikki Black, but when her mother left her, in 1968, at the door of a London post office, her name was Susan Lovage. At 29, after years of foster homes and being asked to move on, of learning how to be manipulative and never being quite good enough at it, and after failure upon failure, for hard-boiled Nikki her life has but a single defining moment: being dropped on the doorstep. She hates her birth mother with a warped passion, and when she finally manages to track her down, she all but salivates at the prospect of killing her. The Hebridean island where Mumsy Phyllis lives, Aysaar, is not hard to reach, and Nikki easily takes a room at her house with no one the wiser, but here the plot thickens: Nikki meets her younger half-brother. Calum is an innocent, simple-minded man, content to do little more than comb the shore and collect everything he finds into huge piles around his house, but in him are stories and fables galore, eager to be told. As he takes Nikki exploring all over the island and they pour out of him, she learns also that he has had trouble with Phyllis, an aloof, controlling figure, an herbalist slowly being ravaged by cancer. With her murderous scheme now modified to take Calum away from Phyllis before killing her, Nikki, in a confused state, tries to seduce her brother. From that point on, however, all her feverishly laid plans go awry.
This tale of a madness as terrifying as it is logical, simple and classical in its tragic lines, is also a complex rendering of the art of storytelling, where history and invention seem to purposefully converge, each to transform the other.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2000
ISBN: 1-58567-076-6
Page Count: 261
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules...
Sentenced to house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel by a Bolshevik tribunal for writing a poem deemed to encourage revolt, Count Alexander Rostov nonetheless lives the fullest of lives, discovering the depths of his humanity.
Inside the elegant Metropol, located near the Kremlin and the Bolshoi, the Count slowly adjusts to circumstances as a "Former Person." He makes do with the attic room, to which he is banished after residing for years in a posh third-floor suite. A man of refined taste in wine, food, and literature, he strives to maintain a daily routine, exploring the nooks and crannies of the hotel, bonding with staff, accepting the advances of attractive women, and forming what proves to be a deeply meaningful relationship with a spirited young girl, Nina. "We are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade," says the companionable narrator. For the Count, that way of life ultimately becomes less about aristocratic airs and privilege than generosity and devotion. Spread across four decades, this is in all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight. Though Stalin and Khrushchev make their presences felt, Towles largely treats politics as a dark, distant shadow. The chill of the political events occurring outside the Metropol is certainly felt, but for the Count and his friends, the passage of time is "like the turn of a kaleidoscope." Not for nothing is Casablanca his favorite film. This is a book in which the cruelties of the age can't begin to erase the glories of real human connection and the memories it leaves behind.
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules of Civility(2011).Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-670-02619-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.
A young New York woman figures there’s nothing wrong with existence that a fistful of prescriptions and months of napping wouldn’t fix.
Moshfegh’s prickly fourth book (Homesick for Another World, 2017, etc.) is narrated by an unnamed woman who’s decided to spend a year “hibernating.” She has a few conventional grief issues. (Her parents are both dead, and they’re much on her mind.) And if she’s not mentally ill, she’s certainly severely maladjusted socially. (She quits her job at an art gallery in obnoxious, scatological fashion.) But Moshfegh isn’t interested in grief or mental illness per se. Instead, she means to explore whether there are paths to living that don’t involve traditional (and wearying) habits of consumption, production, and relationships. To highlight that point, most of the people in the narrator's life are offbeat or provisional figures: Reva, her well-meaning but shallow former classmate; Trevor, a boyfriend who only pursues her when he’s on the rebound; and Dr. Tuttle, a wildly incompetent doctor who freely gives random pill samples and presses one drug, Infermiterol, that produces three-day blackouts. None of which is the stuff of comedy. But Moshfegh has a keen sense of everyday absurdities, a deadpan delivery, and such a well-honed sense of irony that the narrator’s predicament never feels tragic; this may be the finest existential novel not written by a French author. (Recovering from one blackout, the narrator thinks, “What had I done? Spent a spa day then gone out clubbing?...Had Reva convinced me to go ‘enjoy myself’ or something just as idiotic?”) Checking out of society the way the narrator does isn’t advisable, but there’s still a peculiar kind of uplift to the story in how it urges second-guessing the nature of our attachments while revealing how hard it is to break them.
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52211-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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