Over a decade after Archangel, Korman returns with a passionate but uneven tale of ritual and rebirth in the early days of psychoanalysis, based on the case of FrÑulein S. ``I'm the Queen of Sparta with a hot rear end!'' With these words young Sabine Schanderein breaks her years-long silence and presents her doctor, junior physician Carl Jung of the Burghîlzli Mental Hospital in Zurich, with yet another enigma. Deposited a few months earlier by her frostbitten father and cold-blooded but fragile mother, her unchanged head-to-toe wrapping and unearthly shrieks at any disturbance offer little hope for a cure. Through patience and understanding, though, Jung gets the girl to talk, only to be cast as her partner in ancient fertility rituals that she directs. Baffled, he contacts Freud, then virtually unknown, for consultation. With persistence and Freud's aid, the riddle of the ritual is solved; Sabine begins to find herself, but when she takes an apartment in Zurich, continuing her therapy with Jung at his home, the previously curbed lust of both therapist and patient is unleashed in their sessions. Cured, and in love, she demands that Jung leave his wife, but Emma's timely pregnancy returns her wayward husband to her and the case is closed. Framing this often gripping mix of insight and insanity are stranger, less compelling visions of the three principals at the ends of their lives—Freud feeling up nurses and dying of cancer in London; FrÑulein S., an analyst herself, being snuffed out along with her children's clinic during a Stalinist purge; Jung, ailing in mind and body, burning the mementos of his greatest, most painful achievement. Frustrating for its inconsistency and excesses, but still worth the effort: a novel that well conveys the life-altering drama of madness and psychoanalysis come face to face.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55970-288-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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