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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
