Moral questions take on human form in Ferrari’s stunning narrative.
What if God was one of us?
When restless Corsican teenager Antonia receives a 14th birthday present of a camera from her doting uncle, a priest, the direction of her life changes. Antonia’s unnamed uncle is also her godfather—although “god” father is probably more accurate—and Ferrari’s affecting account follows the sequence of the requiem Mass the uncle celebrates for her years after her death in a car accident. Much of Antonia’s adolescence is immersed in the turmoil of Corsican partisan activity thanks to a youthful romantic attachment, and she supports herself with a stultifying job as a photographer for a provincial paper. Eventually, she is drawn to photograph the horrors and grotesqueries of the destruction of Yugoslavia. Her life ends shortly after she has an impromptu reunion with a combatant she knew during that scarifying time. Ferrari, a Prix Goncourt winner, revisits the history of war photography, which, along with Antonia’s growing fascination with the allure of violence, creates space for discussions of evil, love, complicity, and the responsibility of the artist. Joycean sentences, some of epic length, propel readers through the consciences and consciousnesses of agonized characters dealing with grief, regret, and love—or, in short: through life. At the beginning and after the end of Antonia’s meaningful existence, she is cared for and guided by her enigmatic uncle—who experiences internal anguish of his own about the petty and human realities of parish life—and she shares with him her observations about the depravities witnessed in her quest to create images. Whether or not Antonia’s uncle serves in some divine capacity, the story his gift sets in motion provides Ferrari with an opportunity to explore the limits of human love and suffering.
Moral questions take on human form in Ferrari’s stunning narrative.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60945-674-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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