This debut novel explores the ways traumas of the past can impact how we experience the present.
An interpreter living in Brooklyn throws herself into the lives of acquaintances to avoid confronting her own life.
The unnamed narrator, a woman from Albania, is married to Billy, an American professor of film. Billy asks his wife to focus on translation work while taking a break from interpreting, as interpreting seems to interfere with her ability to remain present. But she takes a job serving as an interpreter for Alfred, another Albanian immigrant, first for a dental visit and then for therapy to confront his demons from the war in Kosovo. The therapist fires her after the first session, for both identifying too closely with the client and getting lost in her own thoughts. From there, the narrator acts impulsively without considering the repercussions. She tries to help a struggling Kurdish woman desperate to evade a stalker and a former client who needs a new immigration attorney. All the while, she’s prone to reveries and what appear to be dissociative episodes that leave Billy stupefied. When they reach an impasse, he accepts a six-month artist’s residency in Hungary. The night before he departs, his wife follows strangers to a party where she gets high on mushrooms and falls asleep. As a wife and a protagonist, she proves wonderfully and frustratingly off-kilter. Eventually she flees New York to visit family in Albania. The novel heats up in the second half, when she returns to Brooklyn, where some of the consequences of her previous heroics materialize to thrilling effect. These suspenseful moments punctuate otherwise meandering tangents. While intriguing at times, the narration relies heavily on rhetorical questions and digressions loosely tied to the story by way of the protagonist’s saying that so and so or such and such “come to mind.” Some of the associations are more interesting than others. The author is at her best when she reveals her thematic concerns and her characters’ interiority, through their idiosyncrasies, interactions with one another, choices, gestures, and dialogue.
This debut novel explores the ways traumas of the past can impact how we experience the present.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781959030805
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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