THE HALF BROTHER

Name: THE HALF BROTHER
Author: Lars Saabye Christensen
ISBN: 1-55970-715-1

by Lars Saabye Christensen & translated by Kenneth Steven ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2004

Translator Steven deserves almost as much praise as does the remarkable author of this enormous, challenging, life-affirming...

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Deracinated, incomplete people undertake interlocking quests for human connection and self-realization.

This epic Norwegian novel, a major European bestseller and prizewinner, is a complex mosaic tracing the lives of several generations of the Nilsens, a fragmented Oslo family, throughout the WWII years and afterward. Christensen’s narrator is Barnum Nilsen, a physically stunted, alcoholic, melancholic scriptwriter who attempts to make sense of his hollow life by assembling a context for it from stories half-told and imperfectly remembered by his distracted forebears and single estranged sibling. The latter is his older half-brother Fred: the product of their mother Vera’s rape by a German soldier, who grew up an angry malcontent (and, incidentally, accomplished boxer), a willfully mute vagabond bent on understanding himself by researching the misadventures of his great-grandfather Willem, vanished during a voyage to Greenland. The former are the unstable Vera herself, her alcoholic mother Boletta, and her maternal grandmother (“the Old One”), a former silent-film star lost in memories of her bygone youth, beauty, and fame. Another narrative and thematic strand explores the past of Barnum’s father Arnold, an itinerant con man who charmed the ingenuous Vera with tales of his youthful adventures, climaxed by joining a circus. It is in fact the lesson Arnold learned under the Big Top (“Imagination is the greatest thing there is!”) that fuels Barnum’s passion to examine every facet of his own past and heritage, in effect curing his own depression and despair by freeing and exercising his imagination. Christensen’s intense saga (with intermittent echoes of such ambitious predecessors as Grass’s The Tin Drum and Michel Tournier’s The Ogre) is both an arduous read (owing to numerous long run-on sentences) and a thrilling and stimulating black comedy that shows, unforgettably, how art—and understanding—are shaped out of pain and suffering.

Translator Steven deserves almost as much praise as does the remarkable author of this enormous, challenging, life-affirming masterpiece.

Pub Date: May 1, 2004

ISBN: 1-55970-715-1

Page Count: 696

Publisher: Arcade

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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BEFORE WE WERE YOURS

by Lisa Wingate ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 6, 2017

Wingate sheds light on a shameful true story of child exploitation but is less successful in engaging readers in her...

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Avery Stafford, a lawyer, descendant of two prominent Southern families and daughter of a distinguished senator, discovers a family secret that alters her perspective on heritage.

Wingate (Sisters, 2016, etc.) shifts the story in her latest novel between present and past as Avery uncovers evidence that her Grandma Judy was a victim of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society and is related to a woman Avery and her father meet when he visits a nursing home. Although Avery is living at home to help her parents through her father’s cancer treatment, she is also being groomed for her own political career. Readers learn that investigating her family’s past is not part of Avery's scripted existence, but Wingate's attempts to make her seem torn about this are never fully developed, and descriptions of her chemistry with a man she meets as she's searching are also unconvincing. Sections describing the real-life orphanage director Georgia Tann, who stole poor children, mistreated them, and placed them for adoption with wealthy clients—including Joan Crawford and June Allyson—are more vivid, as are passages about Grandma Judy and her siblings. Wingate’s fans and readers who enjoy family dramas will find enough to entertain them, and book clubs may enjoy dissecting the relationship and historical issues in the book.

Wingate sheds light on a shameful true story of child exploitation but is less successful in engaging readers in her fictional characters' lives.

Pub Date: June 6, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-425-28468-1

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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SULA

by Toni Morrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1973

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In a neighborhood where pain—"adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids"—is as pervasively omnipresent as the loveliness of May's green shade trees, death and its omens can be accepted as another face of God. But in the closed black community of the high hill overlooking a white Ohio town, there are two who stand outside the defensive webs of familial interdependence. There is mad Shadrach, victim of World War I, who defies death's capricious obscenity by ringing his bell for National Suicide Day every year—and one year he has some takers. And Sula, who will die, not like "other colored girls" rotting like a stump, but falling "like a redwood." For she is the product of a "household of throbbing disorder" and had learned isolation and the "meaningless of responsibility" early when she accidentally caused the drowning of a little boy. Intemperate, restless, Sula had some of the arrogance of her one-legged grandmother Eva. It was Eva who had long ago pondered the meaning of love when she used her only food (lard scrapings) to cure her baby boy's bellyache; yet when her son was a man, regressing to the womb of drugs, she burnt him to death. Sula also watched her mother die in flames, conscious only that she wanted the dying dance to go on. She left the village and returns to become the community's unifying evil—but will the people eventually love one who stood against the sky? Miss Morrison, author of The Bluest Eye (1970), in her deceptively gentle narrative, her dialogue that virtually speaks from the page, and her multilayered perceptions drawn through the needle's eye of any consciousness she creates, is undoubtedly a major and formidable talent, and this is an impressive second novel.