A poetic premise with language to match.
At the very top of the world, two lonely outsiders find comfort in each other in Dinerstein’s deliciously melancholy debut.
After her college relationship predictably disintegrates, 21-year-old Frances, an aspiring artist, accepts an apprenticeship at the Viking Museum in Lofoten, a string of islands 95 miles above the Arctic Circle in Norway, trading in a summer watching her parents’ marriage unravel for a summer learning to paint all-yellow murals under the tutelage of the strong and silent Nils. Meanwhile, 17-year-old Yasha and his beloved baker-father, Vassily (“if the Danishes are sour, one babka on me”), gleefully ditch their home in Brighton Beach to take a summer trip back to the motherland. But the trip, such as it was, ends in tragedy, and Yasha, too, finds himself in Lofoten, now unmoored and unattached. And so Frances and Yasha—united by their separate losses, united by being the sorts of people who deal with those losses by building new and inherently temporary lives at an Arctic Viking Museum—fall into an unlikely kind of romance. Dinerstein’s writing is light and lyrical, and her descriptions of the far north are intoxicating. Yasha and Frances and the cast of sitcom-ready Norwegian misfits who staff the museum are engaging and sad and quirky, if not particularly substantial. It hardly matters, though, because the heart and soul of the novel belongs to the fathers: Yasha’s father, with his bakery and his deep optimism and his broken heart, and Frances’ father, a colossally talented medical illustrator who, in late middle age, seems to be methodically disassembling the life he’s built. As the rest of the novel fades into memory, it’s the fathers, in their supporting roles, who linger long after the last page.
A poetic premise with language to match.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-112-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
© Copyright 2025 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.
