Truly a novel that will claim your heart.
From the late Israeli author (1916–2006), a novel short on plot and character, long on the Awareness of Things; first published in 1992 and now translated into English.
Herein fall the shadows of Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Faulkner (As I Lay Dying) and Woolf (The Waves), for, like those masters, Yizhar (Midnight Convoy and Other Stories, 1969, etc.) is preoccupied with the way the mind works, the way it apprehends objects and experiences the world. Given such a preoccupation with subjective states, it’s not surprising that the novel subordinates setting and plot to the contours of consciousness, and yet, over time, we gradually become aware of characters and of the space they inhabit. The novel consists of a series of long interior monologues, beginning with a child’s earliest memories of his father, a farmer and “tiller of the soil,” plowing a field in Palestine around the year 1917. His meditations on connection to family and to the land are interrupted by a vicious attack by wasps and by his father’s subsequent panicked attempts to get him medical attention. This movement from philosophical introspection to personal crisis provides the story’s rhythm. We learn most of the story through a series of concatenated monologues in which we move from the child’s initial terror to his awakening (and, to him, bewildering) sexual awareness in early adolescence. A major theme involves the narrator’s growing sense of place and his concern with renewal of the land. Early in life, he learns about despair: “This land is given to desperate people . . . to truly desperate people. And they all compete to see who is the most truly desperate,” but his ultimate epiphany is the sweet awareness that “everything here is provisional . . . and you bathe your heart in the certainty that everything will turn out well.”
Truly a novel that will claim your heart.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-59264-190-3
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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