Short-listed in 1992 for the newly established Russian Booker Prize, Petrushevskaya's short novel (her first to be translated into English) is especially meaningful if its literary echoes are pre-established for the non-Russian reader. The narrator is an aging poet named Anna, pointed namesake of Anna Akhmatova, who shares her great predecessor's fate of having had a son in jail. But there the close resemblances end, for this Anna is in a sense an anti-Akhmatova: a frump without mystery, grace, or beauty in suffering. Her pain is homely, and what feeds her poetry is anyone's guess. She supports and lives with any number of essentially ungrateful relatives, mostly her flighty daughter Alyona; the two children Alyona bears with various unsatisfactory consorts and then pretty much gives up to her mother's care; Anna's own gone-around-the-bend mother; and now and then her son, Andrei—no noble gulag-ite, but a cadging, thankless wretch. The life here is hectically, hilariously close: Russian domesticity at its most unsparing, with everyone in each other's hair, minds, lives. Anna's narrative is interspersed with Alyona's romantic and hopeless diaries (read on the sly by her snooping mother, who, much to the author's credit, is anything but a saint), which operate as a plane of yearning for heights that daily life never reaches. The novel's affective core, though, is Anna's love for her grandson Tima, and it's here that Anna's credibility as a poet comes to the fore: ``Great thick curling lashes, little fans! All parents, and grandparents especially, love their babies physically like this, make them make up for everything else in life. It's sinful love I tell you...But what can you do? Nature intended for us to love.'' Told in an intimate, loose, over-the-back-fence style, this is an alternately funny and desperate book—a welcome introduction to a strong talent.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43616-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out...
A post-apocalyptic novel in which Hig, who only goes by this mononym, finds not only survival, but also the possibility of love.
As in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the catastrophe that has turned the world into its cataclysmic state remains unnamed, but it involves “The Blood,” a highly virulent and contagious disease that has drastically reduced the population and has turned most of the remaining survivors into grim hangers-on, fiercely protective of their limited territory. Hig lives in an abandoned airplane hangar and keeps a 1956 Cessna, which he periodically takes out to survey the harsh and formidable landscape. While on rare occasions he spots a few Mennonites, fear of “The Blood” generally keeps people at more than arm’s length. Hig has established a defensive perimeter by a large berm, competently guarded by Bangley, a terrifying friend but exactly the kind of guy you want on your side, since he can pot intruders from hundreds of yards away, and he has plenty of firepower to do it. Haunted by a voice he heard faintly on the radio, Hig takes off one day in search of fellow survivors and comes across Pops and Cima, a father and daughter who are barely eking out a living off the land by gardening and tending a few emaciated sheep. Like Bangley, Pops is laconic and doesn’t yield much, but Hig understandably finds himself attracted to Cima, the only woman for hundreds of miles and a replacement for the ache Hig feels in having lost his pregnant wife, Melissa, years before.
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out some hope that human relationships can be redemptive.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95994-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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