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WANDERER

Romantic with a capital R, the novel ultimately treats the relationship between the two men with a delicacy that is...

Léon's slim debut novel tells the story of a French composer and his former student, brilliant but difficult, who reappears unexpectedly after an absence of 10 years.

The book opens with "a wandering silhouette, lost in the surrounding whiteness," chanting the words to the eponymous Schubert song. It's January in the lonely foothills of the Bourbonnais mountains. Hermin, a composer, has taken refuge in his work when a surprise visitor imposes on his solitude: Lenny, the piano prodigy he hasn't seen in a decade. "A teenager had left him; a man had returned." There are two central mysteries here: Why has Lenny come back into Hermin's life? And why did he leave so abruptly all those years before? Interwoven with the third-person account of their strained reunion is an extended flashback from Hermin's point of view, detailing how he first came to befriend the German teenager and eventually take him in. Other mysteries arise. What is behind Lenny's passionate insistence that he will never give another concert? Why won't he stop coughing? And why do these characters have such a hard time asking direct questions? Both writing and story are overwrought and often melodramatic: "music, that sovereign divinity, that inexpressible force to which he'd consecrated himself since childhood, and in which nothing, not absence, not even suffering, would ever be able to shake his faith." The mood grows claustrophobic. After revealing the truth about a decade-old betrayal, Lenny hurls himself coatless into a winter storm, risking death by exposure and compelling Hermin into the dark night after him. What claims are we allowed to make on the people we love? Léon seems to ask. And what do we owe those who love us in ways we can't reciprocate?

Romantic with a capital R, the novel ultimately treats the relationship between the two men with a delicacy that is unexpectedly moving.

Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-59051-925-7

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Other Press

Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018

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NORMAL PEOPLE

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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THE BLUEST EYE

"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.

Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970

ISBN: 0375411550

Page Count: -

Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970

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