Seven compelling explorations of vacancy in another perfectly spare and atmospheric translation.
Empty homes, emptied lives, and emptying memories: Life's—particularly family life's—many emptinesses and emptyings abound in this ethereal collection.
Although its original Spanish publication preceded that of Little Eyes (2020), the author’s most recent translation into English, this collection may feel like a progression from McDowell's translations of Schweblin's other works, which dwell more squarely in the fantastic and the speculative, often pushing into nightmare territory, and into a quieter, more human-centered and realism-bound world—though one thrumming with just as much eerie tension, as Schweblin evokes the uncanny in the human rather than placing the human in the uncanny. In “None of That,” a woman finally discovers an appreciation for her mother's unusual pastime. In “My Parents and My Children,” a man confronts an uncomfortable situation he has been drawn into with his ex-wife and her new boyfriend when she asks him to bring his probably unsound and decidedly nudist parents to visit their children at a rented vacation home. A neighbor considers what might be driving a recurring cycle in “It Happens All the Time in This House,” where the woman next door throws her late son’s clothes over their fence and her husband comes, unfailingly, to retrieve them. “Breath From the Depths,” the collection's emotional pinnacle, introduces Lola, a paranoid and housebound elderly woman who's outlasted her will to live and her capacity to do anything about it, as her memory empties alongside the contents of her home. “Forty Centimeters Squared” finds an unnamed woman, after moving away to Spain, returned to Buenos Aires, her belongings packed in a storage unit and with no home to call her own. “An Unlucky Man” follows a girl whose younger sister’s antics have resulted in a trip to the hospital, where she is forgotten and ignored until she meets the unluckiest man in the world in the waiting room, who takes her on a birthday adventure that ends badly but might easily have ended even worse. And, finally, in “Out,” a woman steps out of the morass of what appears to be a failing relationship and, for a moment, into new possibilities, guided by a mysterious maintenance man who claims to have been fixing her building's fire escape—a self-described escapist.
Seven compelling explorations of vacancy in another perfectly spare and atmospheric translation.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-54139-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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