Fans of the novel One Day and the movie Sliding Doors will want to pick up this debut.
The multiverse migrates out of science fiction for a fling with romance.
Eva Edelstein, biking to class in 1958 at Cambridge, runs over a rusty nail. A tall, blue-eyed student, Jim Taylor, offers to fix her tire. In version one, she accepts his help and eventually marries him. In version two, she is muddled and marries a less-likely beau. In version three, Eva marries the same lesser bloke but makes a course correction midbook. In bite-sized alternating chapters, Eva’s and Jim’s lives spin along, apart and intersecting, together and fraying, over the next 56 years. Newcomer Barnett labels each chapter installment as version one, two, or three. This triple-braided structure builds poignancy, as the same 30th birthday party or funeral, populated by the same characters, unspools into different outcomes. So Eva is “plumping cushions” while Jim’s lover Helena is “cleaning, tidying” in parallel but different stories as Jim paints a triptych he calls The Versions of Us. Children arrive, toddle, grow into sullen adolescence, and launch families of their own. Careers founder or flourish; infidelities are pursued. Pot is inhaled throughout the 1960s; tobacco is smoked to the end. In every era, cats are petted under their chins, and vats of alcohol swilled. Secondary characters—Eva’s best friend, Penelope; Jim’s art dealer, Stephen—are barely inhabited devices. Barnett, a British journalist writing her first novel about British journalist Eva trying to write her first novel, has a weakness for clichés and clunkers, such as “Do you see how beautiful we are?” Beauty is not enough, of course. Those readers particularly fond of the one-true-love trope will overlook what cloys. Others will long for the superior sentences and searing London Blitz scenes in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, a much better multiverse novel. Still, this debut work, like three snowballs running downhill, gathers the old-fashioned Newtonian momentum of a good yarn. We see the consequences of small choices echoing through the years.
Fans of the novel One Day and the movie Sliding Doors will want to pick up this debut.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-63424-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
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