Weighed down by simplistic writing, this ambitious novel's reach exceeds its grasp.
This nearly century-spanning novel traces a story set in Guatemala that explores different Americans' relationships with the country and a mystery involving an American family that winds through the turbulent politics of the century.
Beginning her novel in 1902, Kerney (Born Again, 2006) introduces Evie, an 8-year-old American girl living in Guatemala; her father encounters corruption and violence as he tries to succeed as a wheat farmer in a corn-centric country. Next, the novel moves to 1954 and an American woman, Dorie, wife to a paternalistic U.S. politician, whose affair with her best friend's husband is causing her endless tension. The next section, set in 1983, follows a married missionary couple encountering a country racked by war. The woman, Lenore, starts to question some of the assumptions of her church (and her husband's dominance) as she attempts to convert the desperately poor Mayan population. This section makes some of the most interesting reading of the book. The last portion, set in 1999, follows a lesbian mother, Jean, who takes her adopted daughter on a journey to explore the girl's Guatemalan heritage—and continue her affair with a fiery professor. The threads of the novel are loosely intertwined, so characters from one passage show up in another, and Kerney's main point—that Americans are naïve and relatively ignorant about a people they often see as backward—is well-taken, though at times it seems overdone. The novel is also weighed down by scenes that go on for too long and by glaring incongruities, especially in the first section. It's doubtful that in 1902, wives cried sarcastically to their husbands during arguments, “Hey, why not?,” and it seems unrealistic that a sheltered 1954 American woman would use the f-word so often. The writing is often lazy: “He was handsome in the usual, exotic Hispanic way” is one description. After pages describing one disaster after another, this line appears: “Guatemala was not at all how her parents had told Evie it would be.”
Weighed down by simplistic writing, this ambitious novel's reach exceeds its grasp.Pub Date: March 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-42901-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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