Irish writer MacMath£na makes his US debut with a story collection that tackles—with rueful satire—a place that has the ``climate for revolution, but not the weather.'' MacMath£na's passion is always under control, but the stories pulse with a sense of frustration and anger at the ways in which those Irish who want a more progressive country are continually thwarted by ancient superstitions, rigid religious beliefs, and a pervasive sense that nothing can or will improve. In ``Wedge,'' a character who accidentally kills his alcoholic and abusive father observes that ``Life is like a tragic drama on television. There are two ways to play it, backwards or forwards. I prefer backwards because that way you always finish with a happy beginning.'' Stories like the ``Queen of Killiney'' (a typically corrupt politician suddenly finds himself pregnant and has to go to England for an abortion), ``Prisoner of the Republic'' (the failure to change the divorce laws ends a long love affair), and ``Waiting for Dev'' (a village awaiting the famous leader De Valera realizes that it is no better off than it was under the British) are all concerned with overtly political themes. Two notable and especially poignant evocations of the Irish dilemma are the title story and ``The Banquet of Life.'' In the first, a committed atheist must deal with the grief of his young daughter at the death of her mother as relatives invoke all the old religious beliefs and superstitions. In the second, Brother Fergus—a teacher who believed that ``absolute obedience kept the soul from `getting notions' '' but who also liked figures, discovering how much he would earn in the outside world for the work he is doing—begins to construct an imaginary life in which he is no longer ``outlawed from the Banquet of Life.'' Some pieces here don't travel as well as others, and one or two are marred by obvious sentimentality, but mostly this is an accomplished debut.
Pub Date: May 12, 1993
ISBN: 0-86327-103-0
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
A masterpiece that well merits this fresh, engaging translation, which marks its author’s 700th birthday.
A much-translated tale of plagues, priestly malfeasance, courtly love and the Seven Deadly Sins finds a satisfying new version in English.
The Decameron, as its Greek-derived name suggests, is a cycle of stories told over a period of 10 days by Florentines fleeing their city for the countryside in order to escape the devastating Black Death of 1348. Perched at the very point of transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the author of those stories, Giovanni Boccaccio, was a narrative innovator: As translator Rebhorn notes in his long, circumstantial introduction, medieval readers were fond of grab bags of stories, but “there is no precedent in Italian literature for Boccaccio’s use of a frame narrative to unify his collection.” Boccaccio borrowed liberally from previously published anthologies, but as Rebhorn also shows, he added plenty of new twists and arranged his material to form a thematic arc: Day 1, for instance, centers on characters who got out of trouble thanks to their native wit, while Day 4 centers on the character flaws that keep people from getting what they want. What so many of his characters want, it happens, are things frowned upon in polite society, as his ribald tale of the poor cuckolded owner of a conveniently large barrel so richly shows. Rebhorn’s translation of Boccaccio’s sprawling narrative, accompanied by informative endnotes, is sometimes marked by odd shifts in levels of diction, often within the same sentence (“That’s when I felt the guy was going too far...and it seemed to me that I should tell you about it so that you could see how he rewards you for that unwavering fidelity of yours”); it is otherwise clear and idiomatic, however, and Rebhorn capably represents Boccaccio’s humor and sharp intelligence.
A masterpiece that well merits this fresh, engaging translation, which marks its author’s 700th birthday.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-06930-3
Page Count: 1264
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
Haunting and superbly crafted, this is a magical book from a writer of immense talent and intelligence.
The lives of three generations of women in Jamaica intersect as they try to build better lives.
Margot, a 30-year-old desk clerk at a hotel in Jamaica, has fallen into a side business of sex with the white men who visit the island looking for poor women to exploit. This, of course, is not the life Margot wants. She only does it to support her younger sister, Thandi, a 15-year-old schoolgirl who's destined to be successful and “make everything better” for the family. Thandi, however, is more interested in being thought beautiful and the type of success that goes along with that, spending her extra money on skin-lightening creams to turn her dark skin whiter. Thandi's and Margot’s tales intertwine with the story of their abusive mother, Delores, and the rest of their poverty-stricken community, set against the backdrop of wealthy white tourists. Margot finds a temporary refuge from the constant barrage of work and men in her romantic relationship with a local woman named Verdene, but she can't escape the fear of violence that same-sex couples in their society face. And, as past secrets come to a head, the poor black and wealthy white worlds of Jamaica collide. This debut novel from Dennis-Benn is an astute social commentary on the intricacies of race, gender, wealth inequality, colorism, and tourism. But these themes rise organically from the narrative rather than overwhelming it. Here are visceral, profound writing and invigorating characters. Here, too, is the deep and specific sensation of experience. Consider teenage Thandi’s first awareness of being watched by the boy she likes: “a pulse stirs between her legs and she hurries down the path, holding it in like pee."
Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63149-176-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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