Stories, yes, but without characters a reader can care about, they remain surface only.
The ten stories in Hermann’s debut are said to have been a great success at home (Hermann is a Berliner), but to the Yankee ear they seem to consist, for the most part, of youth, pose, and attitude.
The exception is the fine opener, “The Red Coral Bracelet,” which ought to have been the title story. A German bride, shortly before the 1905 revolution, is taken to St. Petersburg by her husband, a builder of furnaces. Furnaces are so needed in Russia that the husband is away for years—with the result that adultery with the bride occurs, and a birth, but not before a duel, and a death. Years later, the bride’s great-granddaughter, burdened with these mixed and exotic origins—and wearing a bracelet from St. Petersburg—unburdens herself to a shrink and loses the bracelet as its string breaks and “the six hundred and seventy-five coral beads were scattered all over the room.” This wonderful Babel-esque release from history is the theme also of the title story (a Berlin cab driver buys an 18th-century manor house, repairs it, then it burns down), but the characters—ultrahip young adults—are so shallow, thin, and unprepossessing that the allegory has no emotion to take root in. Likewise, in “Hurricane (Something Farewell”), two young women visit a friend who’s gone to live on a tropical island, but the characters are so insensitive and unlikable that the story’s symbols are just exercises in air. Other pieces, too, seem more riff than depth: In “Sonja,” a strange woman becomes fascinating to a painter; an aging bachelor living in a fleabag hotel in New York meets a girl and doesn’t know what to do (“Hunter Johnson Music”); a girl seduces a famous artist, who’s a near-dwarf (“Camera Obcsura”); and a hatefully cranky old granny dies by catching on fire from a candle (“The End of Something”).
Stories, yes, but without characters a reader can care about, they remain surface only.Pub Date: April 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-000686-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
