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WHAT WE DON'T KNOW ABOUT CHILDREN

Name: WHAT WE DON'T KNOW ABOUT CHILDREN
Author: Simona Vinci
ISBN: 0-375-40411-2

by Simona Vinci & translated by Minna Zallman Proctor ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2000

One feels there’s a more expansive, expressive story struggling to break through the rigid confines of this almost...

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An insular world of sexual play and fantasy is explored with affectless and disturbing clarity in this 1997 first novel by a young Italian writer, awarded her country’s Elsa Morante Prize.

Vinci’s protagonists and victims are five children, all living in a Bologna suburb, who surreptitiously furnish and meet in an abandoned shed that they employ as a “play house.” Following orders given by the oldest of them, 15-year-old Mirko, they peruse pornographic magazines and begin experimenting with one another’s bodies, at first impersonally, attentive to Mirko’s warning that “We can’t be like other people, do the whole couple thing”: they must exist solely as a group, independent of the conventional world of their parents and schoolmates. But the introduction of sadomasochism and child pornography into this willful Eden turns their playhouse into something far more sinister, and the story segues—quite credibly—into dangerous new territory. Vinci has an unerring eye for the quixotic mixture of high energy, rebellion, self-consciousness, and ennui that brings such characters as the brooding Mirko, the younger Matteo (a gentle boy who, poignantly enough, prefers sports to their jaded games), and especially dreamy, sentient ten-year-old Martina (the focal character) vividly to life. But ultimately you don’t know what to make of this accomplished yet opaque novel. Is it an allegory of incipient fascism? (Mirko’s morning erection seems to him “a symbol of omnipotence.”) Or a muted lament for the passion (and the innocence) that lives briefly and perishes quickly (“Sunflowers always go black in September, as if burnt”)? Vinci efficiently immerses us in the book’s amoral hothouse aura—but it’s hard to care about characters who care so little for others or even themselves.

One feels there’s a more expansive, expressive story struggling to break through the rigid confines of this almost unnaturally poised and controlled one. Perhaps that will be Vinci’s next novel.

Pub Date: June 7, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-40411-2

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.

The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.