Enigmatic and sometimes troubling, and so trademark Handke.
Two novellas by the noted, sometimes controversial Austrian writer and Nobel laureate.
Whereas in his nonfiction Handke can be polemical and strident, in his fiction he is rather more subtle—at least to a point. This brace of novellas is no exception. In the first, he opens with a never quite fully defined man who addresses himself in the mirror, saying, “So this is the face of an avenger!” He’s not a superhero, but instead a man who roams the streets of his adopted Paris in search of a journalist who’s landed a roundabout insult upon him by suggesting that his mother once rejoiced at the Anschluss by which Nazi Germany absorbed Austria into the Reich, “which made her a supporter, a Party member.” Not so subtle among the narrator’s wanderings are the encouragements he receives from an Arab shopkeeper: “‘Kill! With a sword. Mah al-saif. Off with his head!’ He didn’t ask for details; in his eyes, insulting a mother deserved nothing less than death.” One wonders, too, at Handke’s characterization of an African cook: “Back to Africa? Didn’t they need magicians there who practiced a different kind of juju, magicians like him?” Questionable racial asides notwithstanding, Handke’s protagonist is all talk and no action: The metaphorical sword he carries is one that merely carves the offender from memory. In the second novella, as if a German-language rejoinder to Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo, an orchard keeper endures a period of madness profound enough to scare the neighbors: “…now and then there was something distinctly odd, uncanny, even sinister about me.” After pondering his demons at considerable length, he makes his way across a lake that divides his country from the next, only to find it apparently devoid of people—a commentary, one might suppose, on the recent pandemic. Improbably, in the ruins, he finds something approaching happiness, even if he still terrifies even his own children.
Enigmatic and sometimes troubling, and so trademark Handke.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780374601447
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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