Metafictive, multilayered storytelling. But the book may leave many readers wondering what the point is.
A slim, suggestive, seafaring fable introduces the Icelandic author to America.
Something of an Icelandic Renaissance man (From the Mouth of the Whale, 2011, etc.), the novelist, poet and playwright has also collaborated with multimedia musical artist Björk (and earned an Oscar nomination in the process). The first American publication of this 2005 novel (which was honored as that year’s Best Icelandic Novel in his homeland) will likely attract a broader readership to an author revered by peers including David Mitchell and Junot Díaz. It leaps across centuries, blurs the line between myth and reality, and features a shape-shifting storyteller who was once a girl and then a gull before becoming a seaman. Yet, he isn’t the narrator, but the teller of one of the stories within the story, which is related by the fictional author of Memoirs of a Herring Inspector, an aged gentleman devoted to his “chief preoccupation, the link between fish consumption and the superiority of the Nordic race.” In 1949, his theories somehow lead to an invitation to voyage on a merchant ship, where he discovers to his consternation that the meals are rarely fish, but more often something like “horse sausage with mashed potatoes and white sauce,” and where each evening features stories from the aforementioned seaman, who finds inspiration in a sliver of wood (which later stirs the loins of the novel’s narrator and serves to link the storytelling impulse with the sexual urge). His tales concern Jason and the Argonauts, a mythical adventure that the storyteller apparently experienced firsthand. Amid theories about how man evolved from fish, dreams that make implausible stories seem even more far-fetched and the narrator’s realization of “the crew members’ tendency to behave as if everything I said was incomprehensible,” the narrative proceeds to a climax in which reality (fictional or otherwise) collapses in upon itself.
Metafictive, multilayered storytelling. But the book may leave many readers wondering what the point is.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-28907-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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