A deeply personal and incisive look at memory, anchored by astute observations.
The struggle of memory against forgetting tracked through three intimate journeys.
Entering the increasingly crowded autofiction field, Mehmedinović examines the effort to remember—or more precisely, to not forget—our “brief and unrepeatable time in this indescribably beautiful world.” The first section concerns Mehmedinović’s authorial stand-in, Me’med, who has a heart attack in 2010 at age 50 that requires him to take medication that can lead to memory loss. The second details a road trip in Arizona that Me’med takes with his son, Harun, in 2015. The trip begins in Phoenix, with a visit to the apartment where the family lived upon first arriving in America from Bosnia 20 years earlier. His son is a photographer specializing in images of the night sky, capturing those moments that we don’t always register upon first reflection. The third—and longest—section focuses on the aftermath of a stroke that Me'med's wife, Sanja, suffers in 2016. The fears of forgetting grow painfully tangible because Sanja loses the last four years of her life, to the point that she wants a cigarette because she's forgotten that she quit smoking. Me’med must relive the same events, answer the same questions, day after day, in the hope that they will both remember. He bounces between his present in the U.S. and his past in Sarajevo, both before the war and during the siege that began in 1992. Friends, often other writers, appear, but the focus here is family. Mehmedinović’s poetic side reveals itself via achingly beautiful imagery and recurring motifs. And he is a remarkably prescient observer of America, including its “closing up” over the past 20 years, shown in the way foreign languages used to “arouse...curiosity, not aversion, certainly not fear.”
A deeply personal and incisive look at memory, anchored by astute observations.Pub Date: March 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64622-007-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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