A carping, tedious journey into the hinterlands.
A wandering, seemingly plotless novel by Austrian writer Handke.
It begins with a bee sting: A pensioner in the exurbs of Paris walks barefoot in the grass and earns a hymenopteran bite for his troubles. Spurred, he takes the occasion to pack his bags and go for an adventure that it pleases him to think is somehow illegal. “Yes, at last I would lay eyes on my fruit thief, not today, not tomorrow, but soon, very soon, as a person, the whole person, not just the phantom fragments my aging eyes had glimpsed in all the years before, usually in the middle of a crowd, and always at a distance, and those glimpses had never failed to get me moving again,” writes Handke in a typically winding sentence. That fruit thief is a young woman who soon becomes the center of the story even though the oldster remains the omniscient narrator. He dislikes the new Europe: “I usually found women in veils properly—or improperly—offputting,” he grumbles, having encountered Muslim women on a train. He finds his fellow humans thick as bricks: “Nothing makes them prick up their ears.” The young woman, Alexia, is no more tolerant, a Nietzschean rebel who emerges as a younger, female doppelgänger to the older man’s world-weary curmudgeon. She wanders across France, her vast handbag full of, yes, pilfered fruit that she considers it her right to possess, staking out places where she can readily nab the stuff: “She evaluated each place according to the spots, nooks, and crannies where a piece of fruit grew that she could grab.” Why not televisions or late-model Renaults? Alexia falls in with an occasional companion who, Handke takes pains to point out, is of darker complexion than she, “fighting his way at her side through this European jungle.” Their travels don’t amount to much, but they afford Handke plenty of opportunities to sneer at modern mores and modern life and the boring homogeneity of humankind, especially the non-European sort.
A carping, tedious journey into the hinterlands.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-3749-0650-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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
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