A keenly observed but rather lifeless portrait. So little happens that it’s difficult to stay involved, let alone...
An impressionistic debut about a young Japanese pearl diver who is sent to a leper colony.
Nowadays considered primarily a disease of the tropics (where it has become increasingly rare), leprosy was a global scourge until quite recently: Talarigo’s story takes place on an island leprosarium off the coast of Japan in the years following WWII. Here, sealed off from all contact with the outside world, the confirmed cases are sent to begin their lives anew under the most terrible circumstances imaginable. The 19-year-old pearl diver who arrives in 1948 and takes the name Miss Fuji (all lepers in Japan at this time are declared legally dead and required to assume new identities in the colony) has only a mild case of leprosy, but she is disowned by her family all the same and committed to the island for life. There, she becomes a medical assistant in the clinic, a place that offers little more than massages (or abortions) by way of treatment. The tale is told in episodic vignettes that move lightly back and forth among the various patients and administrators. We meet Miss Min, a storyteller; Mr. Shirayam, a gardener; Miss Morikowa, a Christian; Mr. Nogami, a Communist; Mr. Oyama, an urn painter; and the pregnant Miss Matsu (who wants, against all regulations, to keep her baby). The dreadful background of Miss Fuji’s hopelessness is, if anything, intensified by the advent of new drugs capable of containing or reversing the disease—and by the stubborn refusal of the national health officials to authorize the discharge of arrested cases (like Miss Fuji’s) back to normal society. Her sense of isolation is made even worse by her ability, as a diver, to swim across the straits to the mainland whenever she wants to.
A keenly observed but rather lifeless portrait. So little happens that it’s difficult to stay involved, let alone interested, throughout the whole.Pub Date: April 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-51051-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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