Although the florid prose and pages of 19th-century discourse sometimes suffocate the story and may prove off-putting for...
Pritchard (The Odditorium, 2012, etc.) blurs past and present, male and female, living and dead, and reality and fiction in a supernaturally infused, innovative story about Victorian-era novelist Vernon Lee and her modern-day biographer.
Newly divorced historical fiction author Sylvia Casey arrives at Villa il Palmerino without a clear purpose. Her husband, Philip, left her for a male colleague the day after his 60th birthday, and her last two books have suffered mediocre sales. In fact, her agent has instructed her to write a book targeted for commercial success, something juicy, and Sylvia hopes to find inspiration in the historically rich area she and her former husband once visited. Living in a rented room at the villa seals her destiny: Sylvia becomes obsessed with—and possessed by—a long-dead writer who once inhabited the premises, Violet Paget. Born into an eccentric family in 1856, Paget spent most of her life in Italy and developed a reputation as an intellectual devoted to art, perception and the supernatural. (A contemporary of John Singer Sargent, the two once vowed to commit themselves to art as they stood over the body of a dead sparrow.) Her homely face, abrasive personality and mannish attire were considered repulsive by some, but she traveled in esteemed circles and held forth on a variety of subjects. Paget was a lesbian who adopted the pseudonym Vernon Lee and claimed that only male authors were taken seriously. She became enamored with two women during her lifetime: naïve Mary Robinson and vivacious, willful Kit Anstruther-Thomson. As Sylvia traces Paget/Lee’s life, the lines between modern existence and events a century earlier become distorted, and even the continuous presence of a dog that follows Sylvia holds significance. Pritchard's fertile imagination and presentation give new meaning to the expression "a meeting of the minds."
Although the florid prose and pages of 19th-century discourse sometimes suffocate the story and may prove off-putting for some readers, Pritchard excellently maintains control of a multifaceted exploration of lesbianism.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-934137-68-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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