Murky, self-conscious meta-fiction, full of intellectual name-dropping.
Esteemed Hungarian writer Esterházy (Celestial Harmonies, 2004, etc.) blurs the lines between autobiography and fiction in this novel about a mother, perhaps his own, whose life centers around soccer.
There isn’t exactly a plot. The middle-aged narrator, who lives in suburban Budapest, reminisces and ruminates about his childhood and adult life with the help of literary allusions and wordplay. Sentences run on for pages while he layers impressions on top of memories, metaphors onto philosophic concepts, characters’ viewpoints within other characters’ dialogue. While trying to navigate the flood of language, American readers will find themselves grabbing at the incongruous but useful footnotes, which offer some minimal help in sorting out the onrush of names and ideas. The narrator’s 90ish mother, in failing health but still a pistol, talks incessantly about soccer (sometimes translated as football). Readers will learn more than they ever wanted to know about Hungarian players and team politics, as well as more significant issues of national politics and culture. When the narrator was growing up under communist rule, his father was brutalized as a scion of the famous Esterházy family. His mother used her passion for soccer as a survival mechanism for herself and the family. She worked in a factory that also employed members of the national team. A beautiful woman with spirit, she manipulated her ability to make friends with the players to advance her career. But the soccer team was always watched by an informer, a party member who may or may not have seduced the narrator as a child. The novel emulates Lampedusa’s The Leopard (referred to repeatedly and admiringly) in its aristocratic nostalgia and choice of an aging protagonist at the cusp of national change, but Esterházy is far more ambiguous and convoluted in his approach to history.
Murky, self-conscious meta-fiction, full of intellectual name-dropping.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-179296-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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