The fourth and final installment in a ``Tetralogy of Elements'' (The Fountains of Neptune, etc.), in which novelist and illustrator Ducornet ``investigates the processes of fabulating, creating and remembering.'' Air is the element investigated in this last volume, which like its predecessors is filled with allusions, some obvious, some not; actual and imagined characters; and a story that's more a series of disparate set-pieces than a concentrated narrative. Here, Memory tells of her beautiful but mute elder sister, the eponymously named Etheria, ``a creature of light and air.'' The siblings' father is Angus Sphery, an eccentric scholar who believes that before the expulsion from Eden there existed a magical ``Primal Language spelled out phonetically by the planets'' and powerful enough ``to conjure the world of things.'' The family lives in Victorian Oxford and are befriended by Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), who is especially taken with Etheria's delicate beauty. When boorish tycoon Rudolph Tubbs falls in love with the adolescent Etheria, he presents her father with the chimera, a beautiful piece of jade—a gift that ensures the latter's consent to the marriage. The unhappy Etheria, however, soon leaves Tubbs, who then travels to Egypt with a mad architect and a circus performer who lives on air. Pyramids collapse, mummies turn into fertilizer, and Memory adds her own random insights, naturally about memory, which ``is like a jade cabinet...where the jade appears to be the same yet the mind is forever replacing it.'' An interesting thought, but not really relevant to the vanished Etheria, who, departing from her father's belief that language could unify all, has concluded the opposite. Rumored to be a magician, she's found ``the Word, surely a silent one,'' that can make everything disappear. Imaginative and beautifully crafted but crushed by recondite intellectual intentions. Too clever by half.
Pub Date: March 15, 1993
ISBN: 1-56478-021-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
A warmhearted and highly entertaining first novel in which a poor but plucky Kentucky gift with a sharp tongue, soft heart and strong spirit sets out on a cross-country trip and arrives at surprising new meanings for love, friendship, and family—as well as overcoming the big and little fears that inhibit lives. Taylor Greer has always been afraid of two things: tires, one of which she saw explode and cripple a local tobacco farmer; and pregnancy, the common, constricting fate of her own mother and, generally, of young girls in Pittman County, KY, where she has grown up. To avoid the latter, Taylor, born Marietta, sets out on a set of the former to find a new life in the West. What she doesn't count on, however, is her flighty '55 Volkswagon temporarily "giving out" in the Oklahoma flatlands or the ditching of a dumbstruck Indian baby in the car while she has it fixed. By the time Taylor's car breaks down again, and finally, in Tucson, Taylor has figured out that the baby has been badly abused, but not how to support it or herself, or how to lure the baby back into trust, growth, and speech. So—she takes a job in a dreaded tire-repair shop from which her car refuses to budge, and meets a motley collection of sanctuary workers, refugees, other ex-Kentuckians, social workers, and spinsters who, together, help her to bolster her courage and create a real family for her sweet, stunned, unbidden child. A lovely, funny, touching and humane debut, reminiscent of the work of Hilma Wolitzer and Francine Prose.
Pub Date: March 16, 1987
ISBN: 0060915544
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1987
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