Grotesquely inventive and amusing, like a corner torn from a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
A family tragedy anchors this absurdist first novel by French poet Vazquez.
In an unnamed city, teenage siblings Salim and Sara live with their father, who cleans compulsively. The family is broke. The kids skip school and don’t have jobs. They sometimes look for their absent mother, visit their terminally ill grandmother, or post poems and videos online. Seeming traumatized and aimless, they scroll on their phones and hang out with a pill-popping friend, Jonathan, whose family died in a suicide cult, and a man called the roommate who burns things and fights a lot. Vazquez mingles their thoughts, conversations, emotions, and backstory, mirroring the frenzied brain rot and beauty of online life, forming an unreal but gripping portrait of digital-age despair and existentialism. Niemi’s translation speeds along terse and dense with endless chatter and poetic turns—“Do dead people have internet?” “For nature, time is nothing,” “Reality wasn’t fair, it wasn’t normal”—set against a backdrop of gruesome, real-world mortality, including many scenes of torture, disease, and bodily decay. The kids have no adult support or role models. The siblings’ father acknowledges he’s letting their grandmother die and offers useless life advice: “If you throw a cake in the forest, when you go back to the forest, you will find a cake. Share.” It’s a rigorously unsettling reading experience, without plot, tension, or character development. But the details and countless vignettes deliver an immense range of emotion. When the roommate asks Jonathan, “Do you actually have a religion, other than taking pictures of yourself?” he’s genuinely curious, not mocking. Amid so much emptiness, with immense appetites for meaninglessness, these young people are at least always talking and keeping a small circle of people close.
Grotesquely inventive and amusing, like a corner torn from a Hieronymus Bosch painting.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781948980272
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Dorothy
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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