A modern-day epic seesaws uncomfortably between absurdity and banality.
A family saga ranges from contemporary Israel to Egypt to Inquisition-era Spain.
Vivienne leaves her job at the bank early to make it to her wedding on time. “I don’t understand,” says her supervisor, “why didn’t you take the day off?” “No need,” she says. Her husband, Charlie, is one of five Egypt-born brothers. Vita, one of those brothers, “was already married to Adele, who didn’t like the yellow part of the hard-boiled egg, and told everyone in the Egyptian garin—their cohort on the kibbutz—that she’s half-Ashkenazi.” Vivienne doesn’t understand the connection between those two details; all she knows is that, “in the dining hall Adele would always mention these facts together.” Castel-Bloom’s (Dolly City, 2010, etc.) latest novel is full of details like these: banal yet charming, mundane to the point of absurdity. Vivienne and Charlie will have two daughters, referred to only as the Older Daughter and Younger Daughter, while Adele and Vita will have one, the Only Daughter. These daughters eventually have daughters of their own. Castel-Bloom traces their lineage—based on her own—in chapters that switch back and forth in time, ranging as far back as 1492, when one small segment of the Kastil family converts to Christianity in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition. Castel-Bloom has a wonderful sense of the absurd; her saga is reminiscent of both Kafka and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. But her novel ultimately fails to satisfy. In many ways, the work reads more like a collection of linked stories than like a unified novel: characters and situations might be introduced in one chapter only to be dropped in the next. It might be that the balance has been tipped too far toward the banal, with chapters like “The Counter Girl Gets Leverage”—in which Vivienne’s Older Daughter, now middle-aged, becomes interested in the fate of a young convenience store worker—simply going on too long. On the other hand, you’ll want to hear more about that Inquisition.
A modern-day epic seesaws uncomfortably between absurdity and banality.Pub Date: July 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-94315-022-9
Page Count: 155
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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