De Kretser, one of our most deeply intelligent writers, offers a book that is wry and heartbreaking, playful and profound.
A reversible novel tells the stories of two Asian immigrants to Australia, one 40 years in the past and one in the future.
It’s the early 1980s, and 22-year-old Lili’s ambitions are grand: She wants to be a cross between Debbie Harry and Simone de Beauvoir. To that end, she leaves Australia—where she had moved with her parents as a teenager—and accepts a post teaching English in southern France. It’s the era of the Yorkshire Ripper, and Lili sees shadows everywhere she goes. But the real monsters are the larger forces that threaten her existence as a brown-skinned woman: racism and sexism. When Lili’s story concludes, at the end of her eye-opening time in Europe, de Kretser’s inventive book begins again: The novel can be flipped upside down and reversed to tell the story of Lyle, who lives in a future just a bit darker than our present. (To say that the book starts with Lili’s story, though, is an arbitrary matter of a reader’s personal sense of chronology. Since there are two covers and two sets of frontmatter, a reader could equally begin with Lyle and travel back in time to read Lili’s story.) Justifications for this format are clear in both novels: “When my family emigrated,” confesses Lili, “it felt as if we’d been stood on our heads.” Lyle, who believes that he must jettison his past in order to fit in with the “Australian values” of corporate drudgery and a whopping mortgage, echoes Lili’s sentiment: “Immigration breaks people. We try to reconstitute ourselves in our new countries, but pieces of us have disappeared.” Only Lyle’s elderly mother, who lives with the family, reminds him that there is another way to live.
De Kretser, one of our most deeply intelligent writers, offers a book that is wry and heartbreaking, playful and profound.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64622-109-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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