Fans of Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, and Kate Bernheimer will find much to love in Meijer’s haunted woods.
A damaged young woman attempts to rebuild her life after a near-deadly affair in this eerie fable.
The speaker of Meijer’s novella in poems is an artist lost inside her own wilderness. “I drew you as I used to draw myself, at first to make / more of you, later to get rid of you, and now I don’t draw you / at all,” she thinks as she attempts to unravel a destructive affair. Years later, she remains haunted by the woods where she once seduced a wolf with “jade eyes” and “silver hair, older than any man I’d ever thought was / beautiful.” Even after she returns to the city, resumes her teaching job, and marries “a man…who takes pity on things, whose pity / leads him to love,” the speaker receives dream phone calls that contain leaves rustling in the wind or erotic commands that call her back to the wild. Meijer (Heartbreaker, 2016) is an expert at worldbuilding, and the narrative she spins is fractured across fairy tale, mythology, and the occult. Broken into lines, the story becomes even more propulsive and strange—we don’t get entire scenes but moments on either side of a blackout or brief glimpses into the speaker’s indelible fear of losing herself to lust and violence. Like Anne Carson or Maggie Nelson, Meijer creates her own genre, somewhere between poetry and prose, myth and reality. While Meijer is sometimes stronger at creating an overall effect than at landing individual lines, the result is still memorable, strange, and haunting.
Fans of Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, and Kate Bernheimer will find much to love in Meijer’s haunted woods.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-948226-01-1
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Black Balloon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.
The husband-and-wife team who have given us refreshing English versions of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov now present their lucid translation of Tolstoy's panoramic tale of adultery and society: a masterwork that may well be the greatest realistic novel ever written. It's a beautifully structured fiction, which contrasts the aristocratic world of two prominent families with the ideal utopian one dreamed by earnest Konstantin Levin (a virtual self-portrait). The characters of the enchanting Anna (a descendant of Flaubert's Emma Bovary and Fontane's Effi Briest, and forerunner of countless later literary heroines), the lover (Vronsky) who proves worthy of her indiscretion, her bloodless husband Karenin and ingenuous epicurean brother Stiva, among many others, are quite literally unforgettable. Perhaps the greatest virtue of this splendid translation is the skill with which it distinguishes the accents of Anna's romantic egoism from the spare narrative clarity with which a vast spectrum of Russian life is vividly portrayed.
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89478-8
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
PERSPECTIVES
A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.
A first novel from Pulitzer-winner Lahiri (stories: Interpreter of Maladies, 1999) focuses on the divide between Indian immigrants and their Americanized children.
The action takes place in and around Boston and New York between 1968 and 2000. As it begins, Ashoke Ganguli and his pregnant young wife Ashima are living in Cambridge while he does research at MIT. Their marriage was arranged in Calcutta: no problem. What is a problem is naming their son. Years before in India, a book by Gogol had saved Ashoke’s life in a train wreck, so he wants to name the boy Gogol. The matter becomes contentious and is hashed out at tedious length. Gogol grows to hate his name, and at 18 the Beatles-loving Yale freshman changes it officially to Nikhil. His father is now a professor outside Boston; his parents socialize exclusively with other middle-class Bengalis. The outward-looking Gogol, however, mixes easily with non-Indian Americans like his first girlfriend Ruth, another Yalie. Though Lahiri writes with painstaking care, her dry synoptic style fails to capture the quirkiness of relationships. Many scenes cry out for dialogue that would enable her characters to cut loose from a buttoned-down world in which much is documented but little revealed. After an unspecified quarrel, Ruth exits. Gogol goes to work as an architect in New York and meets Maxine, a book editor who seems his perfect match. Then his father dies unexpectedly—the kind of death that fills in for lack of plot—and he breaks up with Maxine, who like Ruth departs after a reported altercation (nothing verbatim). Girlfriend number three is an ultrasophisticated Indian academic with as little interest in Bengali culture as Gogol; these kindred spirits marry, but the restless Moushumi proves unfaithful. The ending finds the namesake alone, about to read the Russian Gogol for the first time.
A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-395-92721-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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