Hawkes's readers have watched him use horses (or stand-ins for them) time after time; in the 1988 Whistlejacket, the equine finally became a subject of its own in a novel about horse-as-object and horse-as-subject. The latter has developed into this book, in which a horse—Sweet William, name changed later to Petrarch—narrates the story of his life. That life, as you'd expect from Hawkes, is one of periodic violent traumas and gothic cruelties: his mother being killed soon after she gives birth (the putting-down is botched; the horse is buried alive, struggles from its grave, and must be put-down again); a brief and physically painful racing career; the humiliation of a dude ranch; finally, the comic eccentricity of being stabled in the gentleman's farm of Master, a milquetoasty but kind virgin who's lorded over by his Irish stablehand Ralph. The story lurches onward, amounting to very little—other than to wrap fond authorial observations about the life of a horse in fancy-pants prose that it's hard to credit direct-in-action Sweet William with (``A large storm, a quiet storm, for the old horse strange and familiar all at once, freighted as it is with the shapes and shadows of recovered youth. Yet sinister in its steadiness, its resolution, its promise that it might not stop until the lot of us—horses, cats, men, barns—have been effaced in nothing less than total obliteration''). Still, the novel ends on one of those notes of epiphanic oddness that Hawkes occasionally does better than almost anyone: Sweet William/Petrarch lives out his last days in the company of a dying goat named Chester: who for a moment, seen from a distance, seems to the horse at first to be—with its aged horn—a unicorn. This section, like a coda of sickness and illusion and redemption, is quite beautiful—though it can't finally tip the balance away from the word-embroidery and fussy stylistics of the rest.
Pub Date: Aug. 3, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-74057-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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