This second volume in Berger's projected trilogy on French peasant life (the first, Pig Earth, was published in 1980) comprises four short stories dealing with love, loss, solitude and survival. Three of these stories show us the farmers and shepherds of the French Alps, their lives molded by the land they work. "The Accordion Player" is a vignette of the middle-aged Felix, racked by a sense of loss after his mother's death—his mother, who was also his co-worker. While Felix had his mother's love, Boris (in "Boris is Buying Horses") has nothing except his ambition until his infatuation with a married blonde. "On this inhospitable earth he had found, at the age of forty-one, a shelter." But the blonde has her own program, and Boris dies destitute. Marius (in "Time of the Cosmonauts") is not much luckier. The old farmer intrigues the fiercely independent Danielle, 50 years his junior; but his need is so great that he scares her away. . .into marriage to a young woodcutter. Finally, in the longer title story, the farm is a puny thing in the shadow of a huge ferro-manganese factory. The protagonist Odile, as self-assured as Danielle, moves onto company property when she is 17 to cohabit with her Russian lover, who is killed in an industrial accident before he can make good on his promise to marry her. Though Odile's loss is the most terrible, she transcends it in a way denied to the men: she gives birth to their child. At the close, hang gliding with her now grown son, her transcendence has become literal. These peasants' search for shelter is marked by haunting images of their need: Felix weeping at the kitchen table, Marius howling a proclamation of his manhood to the mountains. What gives the stories their additional quality of surprise is Berger's generous humanist vision, which allows for the possibility of transcendence, and even of miracles. His trilogy moves serenely forward.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1987
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1987
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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