A deftly rendered meditation on trauma, madness, and art.
A guilty man finds himself at the center of Paris’ artistic community in Personne’s debut literary novel, the first in a planned series.
In 1926, Geoffrey Weidmann, a veteran of the Great War, flees his farm in Austria after waking up next to the body of a dead man. Rather than risk standing trial for murder, Geoff goes with his father to Paris, where his estranged brother, Franz, has already settled. Geoff is a mess, mentally and emotionally, haunted by his experiences in the war as well as by the body he left buried (in a very shallow grave) back in Spital. He soon acquires some drinking buddies who introduce him to the city’s artistic avant-garde, including two poets at the center of the burgeoning Surrealist movement: the visionary Antonin Artaud and the buoyant Robert Desnos. Their poetry describes existence in ways Geoff has never encountered before. Under their influence, Geoff begins to find the words to articulate the previously unspeakable tumult he experiences inside his head. “The dead part of oneself. Artaud’s words were still banging around inside of me the same way the West Indies music reverberated from down the street.” Geoff hopes he may finally banish the ghosts of his past…until he gets word that his old farm will soon be sold and the body he buried on it potentially discovered. Personne’s baroque prose captures the lyricism of the period, as here, when Geoff sees Artaud for the first time: “He had that chiseled, angular face…and a taut body like a flame. He resembled a desert-wandering fanatic, or a medieval angel trapped in stone in a cathedral.” The book is in a decidedly modernist tradition, with its nearly 400 pages dedicated primarily to drinks and aesthetic discussions of bohemians and writers. Fans of the Parisian scene in this era will marvel over the detail—Personne strives to depict the lives of Artaud and Desnos as accurately as possible—but those without a reference point may become lost and sometimes bored in these pages.
A deftly rendered meditation on trauma, madness, and art.Pub Date: June 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781977260826
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
