Autobiographical first novel about manic-depression. Given that he takes as his subject here the murky corners of the mind, Zwiren is remarkably clear. The story begins with the record of an ongoing episode, in the summer of 1991, as Zwiren walks through Manhattan, deftly exposing the reader to the narrator's mercurial obsessions—with numbers, with colors, with sex, but most of all with God. He thinks he's Jesus. The opening episode ends in an emergency room. Then Zwiren flashes back to the winter of 1982, when as a scholarship student he tries to negotiate college for the first time. A simple episode in a bookstore is illustrative: Zwiren stands in line, changes his mind and gets out of line, gets in line, fears the line, fantasizes about the line, runs from the bookstore. Delusions of grandeur coalesce with rank paranoia as Zwiren takes the reader through the 1980s; sometimes he functions reasonably well, holding down jobs and even entering into brief relationships, but sooner or later reality slips away from him and he's back on the ward. Zwiren ends his account in the summer of 1990; enrolled in a support group, and taking various medications, he can mostly manage, but he has had to accept the fact that his condition is incurable. His novel, meanwhile, is repetitive, boring, heartbreaking, and quite beautifully written. That is, while the narrative tends to circle around the same points over and over again, Zwiren spins image after striking image, all the more remarkable for being his authentic view of the world rather than some literary experiment: ``The insides of my eyelids are unsafe,'' he notes in passing; in another passage, attempting to explain the allure sleep holds for him, he writes that ``the aim is to get to the threshold of sleep, a gluey sleep, a cheese melt.'' A must for anyone interested in the nature of mental illness as seen from the inside.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1996
ISBN: 1-56478-130-5
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
Read this for insights about writing, about losing one’s mother, about dealing with a cranky sous-chef and a difficult...
A Boston-area waitress manages debt, grief, medical troubles, and romantic complications as she finishes her novel.
“There are so many things I can’t think about in order to write in the morning,” Casey explains at the opening of King’s (Euphoria, 2014, etc.) latest. The top three are her mother’s recent death, her crushing student loans, and the married poet she recently had a steaming-hot affair with at a writer’s colony. But having seen all but one of her writer friends give up on the dream, 31-year-old Casey is determined to stick it out. After those morning hours at her desk in her teensy garage apartment, she rides her banana bike to work at a restaurant in Harvard Square—a setting the author evokes in delicious detail, recalling Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter, though with a lighter touch. Casey has no sooner resolved to forget the infidel poet than a few more writers show up on her romantic radar. She rejects a guy at a party who reveals he’s only written 11 1/2 pages in three years—“That kind of thing is contagious”—to find herself torn between a widowed novelist with two young sons and a guy with an irresistible broken tooth from the novelist's workshop. Casey was one of the top two golfers in the country when she was 14, and the mystery of why she gave up the sport altogether is entangled with the mystery of her estrangement from her father, the latter theme familiar from King’s earlier work. In fact, with its young protagonist, its love triangle, and its focus on literary ambition, this charmingly written coming-of-age story would be an impressive debut novel. But after the originality and impact of Euphoria, it might feel a bit slight.
Read this for insights about writing, about losing one’s mother, about dealing with a cranky sous-chef and a difficult four-top.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4853-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
In the contest of Most Winning Combination, it would be hard to beat grumpy Ove and his hidden, generous heart.
Originally published in Sweden, this charming debut novel by Backman should find a ready audience with English-language readers.
The book opens helpfully with the following characterizations about its protagonist: “Ove is fifty-nine. He drives a Saab. He’s the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars and his forefinger a policeman’s torch.” What the book takes its time revealing is that this dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeon has a heart of solid gold. Readers will see the basic setup coming a mile away, but Backman does a crafty job revealing the full vein of precious metal beneath Ove’s ribs, glint by glint. Ove’s history trickles out in alternating chapters—a bleak set of circumstances that smacks an honorable, hardworking boy around time and again, proving that, even by early adulthood, he comes by his grumpy nature honestly. It’s a woman who turns his life around the first time: sweet and lively Sonja, who becomes his wife and balances his pessimism with optimism and warmth. By 59, he's in a place of despair yet again, and it’s a woman who turns him around a second time: spirited, knowing Parvaneh, who moves with her husband and children into the terraced house next door and forces Ove to engage with the world. The back story chapters have a simple, fablelike quality, while the current-day chapters are episodic and, at times, hysterically funny. In both instances, the narration can veer toward the preachy or overly pat, but wry descriptions, excellent pacing and the juxtaposition of Ove’s attitude with his deeds add plenty of punch to balance out any pathos.
In the contest of Most Winning Combination, it would be hard to beat grumpy Ove and his hidden, generous heart.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3801-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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