An honorable failure: Kundera’s taking himself too seriously is offset by his ability to change the subject again and...
Czech émigré Kundera (Identity, 1998, etc.) returns to Prague for this hodgepodge of romance, history, and philosophy.
Kundera has long since morphed into a kind of Czech Woody Allen, writing novels about neurotic characters falling into impossible love affairs while the narrator diverts himself with highbrow musings on fate and history. The odd couple this time are Josef and Irena, each returned to Prague after more than 20 years’ exile to see what it has made of life after Communism. Irena has lived in Paris since 1969, and wasn’t especially eager to go back—her French friends had to persuade her to return, partly because her Swedish lover Gustaf recently set up a business in Prague. Josef is returning from Denmark, where he’s lived also since the 1960s. The two were young and inexperienced lovers then, in the Prague Spring that nearly toppled the Party—and led eventually to their emigration. Both married abroad, but both spouses have now died. Back again, Irena finds little that’s appealing: The city is gray, her old friends foreign and distant. Josef finds that his older brother, once a Party stalwart, has adjusted to the new order and become an entrepreneur. Together, Josef and Irena try to discover what they lost when the Soviet invasion forced them apart in 1968, but their old love seems to have become as distant and alien as the city has. As usual, the author fills out the story with reflections on Schönberg, the Odyssey, and philosophy (“Memory cannot be understood, either, without a mathematical approach. The fundamental given is the ratio between the amount of time in the lived life and the amount of time from that life that is stored in memory”), which are diverting in their way but also distracting.
An honorable failure: Kundera’s taking himself too seriously is offset by his ability to change the subject again and again—though, at end, nothing adds up to much.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-000209-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The novelist loves this land and these characters, with their enduring values amid a way of life that seems to be dying.
A heartland novel that evokes the possibility of everyday miracles.
The third novel by Wisconsin author Butler (Beneath the Bonfire, 2015, etc.) shows that he knows this terrain inside out, in terms of tone and theme as well as geography. Nothing much happens in this small town in western Wisconsin, not far from the river that serves as the border with Minnesota, which attracts some tourism in the summer but otherwise seems to exist outside of time. The seasons change, but any other changes are probably for the worse—local businesses can’t survive the competition of big-box stores, local kids move elsewhere when they grow up, local churches see their congregations dwindle. Sixty-five-year-old Lyle Hovde and his wife, Peg, have lived here all their lives; they were married in the same church where he was baptized and where he’s sure his funeral will be. His friends have been friends since boyhood; he had the same job at an appliance store where he fixed what they sold until the store closed. Then he retired, or semiretired, as he found a new routine as the only employee at an apple orchard, where the aging owners are less concerned with making money than with being good stewards of the Earth. The novel is like a favorite flannel shirt, relaxed and comfortable, well-crafted even as it deals with issues of life and death, faith and doubt that Lyle somehow takes in stride. He and Peg lost their only child when he was just a few months old, a tragedy which shook his faith even as he maintained his rituals. He and Peg subsequently adopted a baby daughter, Shiloh, through what might seem in retrospect like a miracle (it certainly didn’t seem to involve any of the complications and paperwork that adoptions typically involve). Shiloh was a rebellious child who left as soon as she could and has now returned home with her 5-year-old son, Isaac. Grandparenting gives Lyle another chance to experience what he missed with his own son, yet drama ensues when Shiloh falls for a charismatic evangelist who might be a cult leader (and he’s a stranger to these parts, so he can’t be much good). Though the plot builds toward a dramatic climax, it ends with more of a quiet epiphany.
The novelist loves this land and these characters, with their enduring values amid a way of life that seems to be dying.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-246971-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
IN THE NEWS
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island.” But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared—often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing “anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable,” they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses—or is simply unable—to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion—as modest as a birthday party—do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters’ kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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