A collection of intriguing characters too often situated in disjointed narratives.
A debut series of short stories set in locations around the world and told from a wide range of perspectives.
At the start of this collection, Hagen depicts the points of view of several different people who’ve come into contact with an unruly, seductive young man named Juan. His mother, her friends, and a girl he knows give their impressions and tell anecdotes about his selfish behavior; Juan also speaks for himself, at one point citing a moment of regret. The characters all relate their stories as if they’re responding to unseen questions, and it’s a style that’s maintained throughout the book; the first-person narrator of “The River,” for instance, describes two gruesome, untimely deaths in his village in the present tense. These two stories both feature compelling voices and intriguing ideas. However, they also feel fragmented, more like half an interview than a complete narrative. Hagen’s descriptions also make their context elusive; the locations may feel foreign to Americans or Europeans, as they feature islands, huts, and monsoons, but the text never gives readers a definitive sense of place. Other stories rectify these issues as they revisit similar themes with much more depth. In “Alfredo,” for example, an old man offers a European traveler details of life in Havana, including roaming packs of hungry dogs, long lines for the bus, and classic cars. The main character of “The Paradise Island” finds himself in a humorous but troubling predicament involving marriage customs in Bali. The shifting perspectives in “The Door” show how two people in love can have completely different ideas about the same situation. In these three standouts, each character has something engaging to offer readers, and the author fleshes out their worlds with concrete details to offer clearer understandings.
A collection of intriguing characters too often situated in disjointed narratives.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-8441-9
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
© Copyright 2026 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.
