The anatomy of a breakup, rendered with unswerving precision by the author of A Pure Clear Light (not reviewed), etc. Out of the blue, Jonathan informs Nicola that he’s concluded she should move out of the apartment they’ve shared for years. It seems he no longer loves her. She asks him to repeat himself; he is cold, vague and certain of his decision. Numb, unable to think, Nicola seeks refuge with her friend Susannah, who holds her while she cries and attempts to comfort her with the requisite observations about the stupidity of men. Initially, Nicola defends Jonathan; she scans the recent past in search of warning signs, of hidden flaws in herself that he may finally have recognized. Jonathan proposes that he buy Nicola out of the apartment that they own together and that had been hers first, back in the days when his friends thought he was incredibly lucky to have nabbed a girlfriend, any girlfriend. Jonathan (who, to the extent he reflects on the breakup, believes that Nicola has done something to his soul) does have his twinges of suffering: the house feels rather empty, he has no clue as to how to feed himself, he remains in the spare room (why not?). Meanwhile, Nicola sleepwalks her way to a new life. She moves into Susannah’s house, idly applies for really good jobs she has no hope of getting, goes out dancing all night with friends from work. If the mechanics of the separation are underwhelming, the backdrop of harried but true-blue friends, kind children, and decent if intrusive parents shows, with richness and realism, the post-breakup interplay between internal turmoil and ongoing real life. This deceptively easy read, then, is in fact spare, sure-handed, and emotionally canny.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7867-0560-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Deep and deeply funny.
A surreal love story about the courtship between a living woman and a dead man.
Rachel is a dark-haired, red-lipped reference librarian living in Brooklyn for whom romance, so far, has been a general disappointment. “I have fallen in love with my own daydreams,” she explains, “and then they have gone out into the world and returned to me embodied as men.” But the men disappoint, in the end. “It was not that the men themselves were realer than the daydream,” she says, but rather that the men were too weak to “withstand the daydream’s reality.” And then, at the bus stop, she sees Thomas and becomes fascinated by this electric, sad-seeming man. He notices her, too, drawn to her perpetual air of alert discomfort, “like a squirrel, or some other kind of nervous prey,” and one Saturday, she follows him onto his bus instead of her own and their courtship begins. (“Men like to believe that they initiate things, but often they only initiate when the fruit is very low-hanging,” she observes, in one of the book’s many delightfully blunt and correct observations.) The problem, of course, is that Thomas is dead. But because of an “institutional error”—the institution being death—he is “insufficiently dead” and so must be temporarily “re-manifested,” returned to a body that “exactly resembles” his own until “the Office” is able to “complete the procedures necessary to process” his arrival. They have issued a set of instructions designed to help him navigate this new phase of his not-quite-existence, all designed to prevent him from incurring regrets. “Sexual contact” is not advised in this state; it is “the most efficient way to incur regrets.” And also, his body is beginning to dissolve. It is a plot that could be—that should be—unbearably twee, oppressively quirky, in love with its own melancholy. Instead, Bonnaffons’ (The Wrong Heaven, 2018) first full-length novel is a rare pleasure: a philosophical rom-com too weird, too bodily, too precise, too fun to get bogged down in trembling sentiment.
Deep and deeply funny.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-51616-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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