Some riffs are off-key but this is an ambitious and original effort well worth checking out.
History as fiction, fiction as history.
In Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, 19-year-old Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife while they were sitting in their car. In this intriguing collection, Martin (Changing the Subject, 2010) gives us something musical—11 variations on a theme, the theme being Princip. It owes something to Donald Barthleme’s famous 24-part postmodernist story, “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning.” In this collection’s first story, “The Real Enemy,” we meet Princip living in Bosnia with his good friend Danilo Ilic. They are two of six radicalized young men anxious to offer themselves up for their country’s freedom. Danilo tries to talk him out of it but he’s unsuccessful. Princip pops up, in one way or another, in every story. It’s best to read them in sequence, wondering where he’ll turn up next, like a game of Where’s Waldo. At first, it’s odd to encounter him as a ghost appearing by someone’s bed or see him finding a cellphone and hearing conversations about himself or meeting a young woman in San Diego and going out for a sandwich with her. But a fictional rhythm is being created, and various literary leitmotifs are being used from story to story—mirrors, watches, the cryptic phrase “ace of lightning”—that help link them together. In the last story, "Sandwiches," we find Princip, despondent about having failed in his attempt to kill the duke, eating at a sandwich shop, talking with a girl about sex, when the duke’s car, now lost, pulls up in front. He has another chance: “He shoots twice.” It’s fascinating to see how successful Martin will be as he moves from one fictional riff to another, playing fiction off history and history off fiction in one humorous, absurd, and serious tale after another.
Some riffs are off-key but this is an ambitious and original effort well worth checking out.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-57366-058-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: FC2/Univ. of Alabama
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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