LOVE’S DEATH

Name: LOVE’S DEATH
Author: Oscar van den Boogaard
ISBN: 0-374-18585-9

by Oscar van den Boogaard & translated by Ina Rilke ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2001

Margriet de Moor, Tessa De Loo, Arthur Japin, Renate Dorrestein—and now Oscar van den Boogard. Are there any more brilliant...

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A destroyed family and an artfully concealed secret history are laid bare with near-surgical precision in this superbly constructed 1999 novel, the fifth (and first in English translation) by one of Holland’s most accomplished and respected writers.

It begins in 1973 with a heartstopping description of Inez Herman’s discovery of the body of her neighbors’ young daughter Vera Klein at the bottom of the Hermans’ swimming pool. Then, in present-tense narration, and rapid-fire sequences of brief declarative sentences, van den Boogard focuses on the grief of Vera’s mother Oda Klein, her withdrawal from her stricken husband Paul (a career army officer), and Paul’s later “escape” to a military post in Suriname, and his three-year separation from Oda. Then the narrative leaps ahead to 1980, Paul’s return home and muted reconciliation with the emotionally opaque Oda: a situation that’s complicated when Daisy—a 15-year-old American girl staying with the Hermans—becomes the Kleins’ houseguest, remaining with them after the Hermans’ house has been mostly destroyed by a mysterious fire; becoming, in effect, a replacement for the daughter Oda and Paul have lost. Van den Boogard tells this highly charged, haunting story in a series of crisp scenes that shuttle between present and past, reaching crisis points when the impulsive Daisy resists her hosts’ protective embrace, and in the revelatory climactic pages, when Paul’s fellow officer Emil (scarcely a presence until late in the book) becomes the missing piece to the puzzles of Paul’s depressive resignation and Oda’s “excruciating, inhuman, constant aloofness.” The continually shifting tone and texture are further enriched by sudden striking images (e.g., a bedroom window looks “like a cage suspended in the dark”) and deft, lightning-quick transitions among its several principal characters’ limited (indeed occluded) viewpoints.

Margriet de Moor, Tessa De Loo, Arthur Japin, Renate Dorrestein—and now Oscar van den Boogard. Are there any more brilliant Dutch novelists out there awaiting English translation? Stay tuned.

Pub Date: June 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-374-18585-9

Page Count: 112

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

by Gabriel García Márquez Gabriel Garcia Marquez ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 1983

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In this new novella by the Nobel Prize-winner, a Colombian-village murder 20 years in the past is raked over, brooded upon, made into a parable: how an Arab living in the town was assassinated by the loutish twin Vicario brothers when their sister, a new bride, was rejected by her bridegroom—who discovered the girl's unchastity. Cast off, beaten, grilled, the girl eventually revealed the name of her corrupter—Santiago Nassar. And, though no one really believed her (Nassar was the least likely villain), the Arab was indeed killed: the drunken brothers broadcasted their intentions casually; they went so far as to sharpen their murder weapons—old pig-sticking knives—in the town market; and the town, universal witness to the intention, reacted with epic ambivalence—sure, at first, that such an injustice couldn't occur, yet also resigned to its inevitability. As in In Evil Hour (1979) and other works, then, what Garcia Marquez offers here is an orchestration of grim social realities—an awareness that seems vague at first, then coheres into a solid, pessimistic vision. But, while In Evil Hour threaded the message with wit, fanciful imagination, and storytelling flair (the traits which have made Garcia Marquez popular as well as honored), this new book seems crammed, airless, thinly diagrammatic. The theme of historical imperative comes across in a didactic, mechanistic fashion: "He never thought it legitimate," G-M says of one character, ironically, "that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature, so there should be the untramelled fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold." (Also, the novella's structural lines are uncomfortably close to those of Robert Pinget's Libera Me Domine.) So, while the recent Nobel publicity will no doubt generate added interest, this is minor, lesser Garcia Marquez: characteristic themes illustrated without the often-characteristic charm and dazzle.

Pub Date: April 15, 1983

ISBN: 140003471X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1983

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
UNTIL AUGUST
by Gabriel García Márquez ; translated by Anne McLean

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY
by Gabriel García Márquez edited by Cristóbal Pera translated by Anne McLean

- BOOK REVIEW
I'M NOT HERE TO GIVE A SPEECH
by Gabriel García Márquez translated by Edith Grossman

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WASHINGTON BLACK

by Esi Edugyan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 2018

A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.

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High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists marks this runaway-slave narrative, which leaps, sails, and soars from Caribbean cane fields to the fringes of the frozen Arctic and across a whole ocean.

It's 1830 on the island of Barbados, and a 12-year-old slave named George Washington Black wakes up every hot morning to cruelties administered to him and other black men, women, and children toiling on a sugar plantation owned by the coldblooded Erasmus Wilde. Christopher, one of Erasmus’ brothers, is a flamboyant oddball with insatiable curiosity toward scientific matters and enlightened views on social progress. Upon first encountering young Wash, Christopher, also known as Titch, insists on acquiring him from his brother as his personal valet and research assistant. Neither Erasmus nor Wash is pleased by this transaction, and one of the Wildes' cousins, the dour, mysterious Philip, is baffled by it. But then Philip kills himself in Wash’s presence, and Christopher, knowing the boy will be unjustly blamed and executed for the death, activates his hot air balloon, the Cloud-cutter, to carry both himself and Wash northward into a turbulent storm. So begins one of the most unconventional escapes from slavery ever chronicled as Wash and Titch lose their balloon but are carried the rest of the way to America by a ship co-captained by German-born twins of wildly differing temperaments. Once in Norfolk, Virginia, they meet with a sexton with a scientific interest in dead tissue and a moral interest in ferrying other runaway slaves through the Underground Railroad. Rather than join them on their journey, Wash continues to travel with Titch for a reunion with the Wildes' father, an Arctic explorer, north of Canada. Their odyssey takes even more unexpected turns, and soon Wash finds himself alone and adrift in the unfamiliar world as “a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind…running, always running from the dimmest of shadows.” Canadian novelist Edugyan (Half-Blood Blues, 2012, etc.) displays as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as her main characters in spinning this yarn, and the reader’s expectations are upended almost as often as her hero’s.

A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.