Huston provides readers with more than a mere snapshot; her raw and sensual writing delivers the complete picture.
A woman explores complex family relationships and discovers truths about herself in this sensual, intricately woven offering from award-winning Huston (Fault Lines, 2008, etc.).
As freelance photographer Rena Greenblatt joins her aging father and abrasive stepmother in Italy for a dreaded week of vacation, the experience evolves into a period of self-reflection about her childhood, relationships, sensuality and self. Rena, a sexually uninhibited free spirit in her mid-40s, has had numerous lovers and husbands. Her chosen profession involves the use of infrared photography that allows her to “see” into the souls of her subjects during their most intimate moments. She is oddly reluctant to use her camera to document her trip and perhaps expose too many truths, but as she spends more time with her father and stepmother, slowly she peels away the complicated layers that encompass the intricate familial relationships that exist. Rena’s imaginary sister and voice in her head, Subra—the backward spelling of deceased photographer Diane Arbus—poses probing questions that prompt revelations about Rena’s background and her family: a once jealous and abusive older brother whom Rena loves, a mother who loved her but was always busy with her disadvantaged clients, and a philandering father, a doctoral candidate who once patterned himself after activist Timothy Leary and dropped acid with his daughter. As the week advances, Rena receives increasingly frantic phone calls from her French-born Algerian lover, who implores her to return to their home in France to document the race riots that are consuming the suburbs of Paris. But Rena, unwilling to affect an early departure, ignores his pleas as she faces the pivotal events of her past and reconciles these with the emotional reality of the present.
Huston provides readers with more than a mere snapshot; her raw and sensual writing delivers the complete picture.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2027-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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