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THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD

Name: THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD
Author: Stephanie Bishop
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3312-1

by Stephanie Bishop ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 20, 2016

An artfully rendered meditation on marriage, home, and identity.

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Charlotte, a young mother in 1960s Cambridge, England, longs for her pre-baby artist self.

Her husband, Anglo-Indian lecturer and poet Henry, just longs for warmth and sun. Worried about Charlotte, who walks in all weather to escape the confining cottage, and about their baby daughter’s health in the perpetual damp, Henry applies to immigrate to Australia. Charlotte reluctantly agrees. But warm and sunny though it may be, Australia is no paradise; Charlotte is bored and listless, and Henry faces racism at work. This second novel brought Bishop (The Singing, 2014) widespread praise in Australia. Her writing is beautifully expressive. Henry looks at the river near their new home in Perth and thinks of India: “It happens like a chemical reaction: the sight of the new country immediately provoking a memory of the old.” After a fight, Charlotte “feels her insides sink, her heart a dark cave, a tiny bird fluttering wildly inside it. There is a speck of light in the distance but the bird cannot find it. She will keep doing what she does not want to do.” Bishop also imparts a cinematic feel—the ticking of a clock as Charlotte draws Henry’s mother in her deathbed, “Her skin is thin and comes together in pleats like the cooled surface of warm milk.” Charlotte, hacking off her daughter’s matted braid: “She has to saw at it, opening and closing the blades, the cutting making a rough scratchy sound.” Colors, sounds, and sensations infuse every page with Charlotte’s and Henry’s worlds. The ending is equally cinematic and as heartbreaking as they come.

An artfully rendered meditation on marriage, home, and identity.

Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5011-3312-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GOLDFINCH
by Donna Tartt

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE FRIEND
by Donna Tartt

- SEEN & HEARD
Podcast Will Explore Bennington College Lit Trio

- SEEN & HEARD
‘The Secret History’ Is New ‘Today’ Book Club Pick

- SEEN & HEARD
Jenna Bush Hager Launching Author Podcast

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OF MICE AND MEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

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Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.