Definitely smart, fairly entertaining, but not likely to expand the author’s audience.
An exploration of life, death, and social media from the author of The Scent of Pine (2014) and Memoirs of a Muse (2006).
Sergey, Vica, Vadik, and Regina are all Russian émigrés living in New York, and all are dissatisfied with the people they’ve become. Sergey keeps losing his job as a financial analyst. Vica put medical school on hold so that Sergey could start his—now permanently stalled—career. Vadik is a successful computer programmer, but his romantic life peaked on his first day in Manhattan. And Regina gave up her work as a literary translator when she married an American tech entrepreneur; now she spends her days binge-watching vintage sitcoms in her Tribeca apartment. For each of them, technology plays a role in the disconnect between the selves they imagine and the selves they actually achieve. This is especially true of Sergey, who’s convinced that Virtual Grave, his idea for an app that will allow the dead to live on via Twitter and Facebook, is going to rescue him from his disastrous career in finance. Vapnyar is a shrewd writer, and her characters are sharp observers. As she shifts from one point of view to the next, each member of this quartet makes up—in some degree—for the blind spots of the others. But these characters often get lost in their own back stories, which means that pages and pages pass in which the narrative stands still. Then the story leaps ahead between chapters; much of the major action happens offstage. These stylistic choices make some sense. The distance between Moscow and New York doesn’t sever the past from the present, and a carefully constructed social media presence can obscure as much as it reveals. Nevertheless, some readers may be frustrated by the uneven pacing, and the happy ending for all feels forced.
Definitely smart, fairly entertaining, but not likely to expand the author’s audience.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90552-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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