One thing’s for certain: You won’t have to work to enjoy this book.
In Tsumura’s English-language debut, an easy job is hard to come by.
Over the past few years, there’s been a surge of novels centered around millennial women disillusioned with the modern workplace. They’re part of a genre that’s taken the unattainable ideals of late capitalism to task with dark humor. Tsumura’s novel gingerly joins those ranks thanks to a protagonist who’s still recuperating from “burnout syndrome.” After leaving what she thought was the job she’d always wanted, the book’s narrator—a 36-year-old woman who’s left nameless—moves back in with her parents and begins to search for an “easy job.” Essentially a perma-temp, she idly floats from one uneventful gig to another—surveilling a hidden-camera feed, writing bus advertisements, punching tickets for a public park—leaving each one the moment she excels. The irony is that as much as she wants to coast through life, she can’t resist the seductive pull of its small thrills, however mundane they may be. Tsumura’s droll wit is so subtle it’s almost imperceptible. It’s the kind that challenges the reader to pay close attention to the nuances at work beneath the narrative. When strange occurrences begin to tail our hapless narrator, the book takes on an unsettling quality but also that of a cozy mystery. To say the least, it has a strange, almost calming effect, like the serenity that comes from building out a perfect spreadsheet. By the book’s end, you realize you’ve just taken a 400-page tour through the lonely world of entry-level jobs, and somehow it leaves you feeling weirdly optimistic.
One thing’s for certain: You won’t have to work to enjoy this book.Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63557-691-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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