by Kat Hausler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 2017
A strongly written tale about resurrecting a marriage under the most unusual and mysterious of circumstances.
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A woman suffering from amnesia doesn’t realize she’s been separated for years from the husband who cares for her in this debut novel.
Helena Bachlein works in advertising in Berlin. Separated from her husband, Joachim, for almost three years, she begins to date again. But after a meeting at a local cafe, she is hit by a truck and lands in the hospital with broken ribs, a broken arm, a broken ankle, and amnesia. Joachim is called to the hospital, and since Helena can’t remember the accident or the past three years, she thinks that they are still together. He doesn’t tell her they are separated and is conflicted about when to break the news. He also neglects to inform her that she has her own apartment and brings her back to his place, explaining that most of her things were put in the basement after a water leak. The internet isn’t working; she doesn’t have a cellphone; and the apartment is on the fourth floor. He contacts Helena’s employer and arranges for her to telecommute, with Joachim returning work to the office via flash drive. A jarring visit from a co-worker named Doro changes everything since she hasn’t heard of Joachim. Helena discovers that she has her own apartment. While Joachim struggles to decide if his attempt at saving the marriage has backfired, the tension intensifies as Helena concludes that she must decide whether she should stay in a relationship that she left behind long ago. Hausler’s novel gives equal time to both Helena’s and Joachim’s thoughts, which is crucial in the sort of psychological drama she has crafted. Careful attention is paid to details that may jog Helena’s memory, including people and places, but also German language conventions. As the story dives deeper into the layers of memory, each word that is spoken or left unsaid becomes important in a cat-and-mouse mind game that gives this pensive story some elements of a thriller. The love that’s described is always on thin ice (“But the moment he touches her, the spell will break, and they’ll just be two people in bed together, without any enchantments”). Hausler’s ability to describe the precarious state of the emotions involved is consistently convincing.
A strongly written tale about resurrecting a marriage under the most unusual and mysterious of circumstances.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-946154-02-6
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Meerkat Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Cormac McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2006
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
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Pulitzer Prize Winner
National Book Critics Circle Finalist
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
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by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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