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THE VOICES

Name: THE VOICES
Author: Susan Elderkin
ISBN: 0-8021-1757-0

by Susan Elderkin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2003

Lots to chew on, but hard to digest.

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Elderkin, whose debut (the award-winning Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains, 2000) painted a lyric picture of the Arizona desert, now delves into the mysteries of the Australian outback.

The story concerns a young man who hears voices that derive either from his schizophrenia or from his special relationship with the Aboriginal spirits that inhabit the landscape. At the start, Billy wakes up in a hospital bed, having attacked an American tourist on a train after being found wandering along the tracks. The doctors assigned to his case consider insanity his defense against assault charges. His Aboriginal nurse Cecily, however, lets him know in subtle ways that she believes other forces caused his wandering and the strange mutilation of his privates (if it is mutilation, not primitive improvement to his manhood). Elderkin intercuts Billy’s recovery process with his buried memories of a childhood spent with his distant mother and pitiful father in an isolated community being dragged into the modern world by an unscrupulous developer. She also offers the perspective of forces of nature—like the wind—as if they were actual characters that watch over Billy (unless they’re merely voices in this head). In particular, there is the Aboriginal girl—or spirit of a girl—Maisie, who draws the young Billy into her world. Shortly after the boy Billy discovers that his mother is having an affair, he takes Maisie for a joyride in one of his father’s cars and runs into a kangaroo. Distraught, he leaves the outback, becomes a miner, and finds himself platonically involved with a young mother of three. But the forces of nature, which Billy perceives as voices, follow him and draw him back to the land, where he undergoes a transformation—or nervous breakdown. If this all sounds confusing, it is. Tottering between spiritual gobbledygook and psychobabble, Elderkin nevertheless does create lush exotic worlds, although an unfortunate undercurrent of polemic weakens the mystery of what has happened to Billy.

Lots to chew on, but hard to digest.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-8021-1757-0

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NOVEL CURE
by Ella Berthoud ; Susan Elderkin

- BOOK REVIEW
SUNSET OVER CHOCOLATE MOUNTAINS
by Susan Elderkin

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SUCH SMALL HANDS

by Andrés Barba ; translated by Lisa Dillman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2017

A darkly evocative work about young girls, grief, and the unsettling, aching need to belong.

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A newcomer to an all-girls orphanage invents a violent game for the other children to play each night.

Marina is in the back seat of her parents’ car during the accident that kills them both. “My father died instantly, my mother in the hospital,” is the refrain she hears, over and over again, from the doctors, nurses, and psychiatrists at the hospital. It’s the same refrain she repeats to the adults at the orphanage to which she is soon taken. Barba’s (August, October, 2015, etc.) fourth novel to appear in English describes the haunting, mysterious world of prepubescent girls. He switches back and forth from Marina’s perspective to the collective point of view of the other girls. They’re a kind of unified body, and Marina, who is new and freshly beset by grief, is not unlike a virus in their midst. One day, Marina impales a caterpillar on a stick, and the other girls gather round to watch. Not long after, Marina invents a “game” for the girls to play each night. “It’s easy,” she tells them. “Each night, one of you is the doll. I put on her makeup, and she’s the doll. And the rest of us look at her and play with her. She’ll be a good dolly, and we’ll be good to her.” It’s a dark, insoluble game, both erotic and violent. Barba’s descriptions of the furtive, nearly cabalistic world of children are wonderful and disturbing. The border between what is real and what isn’t has been fogged over. His writing is both lyrical and spare, and the slim volume, which can be read in a single sitting, carries a heft far outweighing its physical presence. Barba’s girls, and their game, will linger in the minds of his readers.

A darkly evocative work about young girls, grief, and the unsettling, aching need to belong.

Pub Date: April 11, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-945492-00-6

Page Count: 108

Publisher: Transit Books

Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE RIGHT INTENTION
by Andrés Barba ; translated by Lisa Dillman

- BOOK REVIEW
AUGUST, OCTOBER
by Andrés Barba ; translated by Lisa Dillman

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NORWEGIAN WOOD

by Haruki Murakami & translated by Jay Rubin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2000

A contemporary equivalent of This Side of Paradise or Vile Bodies, and another solid building-block in one of contemporary...

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A first US appearance of a novel originally published in 1987, this crisp portrayal of “flaming youth” in the late 1960s proves one of Murakami’s most appealing—if uncharacteristic—books.

Best known to us as the comic surrealist-symbolist author of such rousing postmodernist fare as A Wild Sheep Chase (1989), Murakami is also a highly intelligent romantic who feels the pangs of his protagonist Toru Watanabe’s insistent sexual and intellectual hungers and renders them with unsparing clarity (the matter-of-fact sexual frankness here seems unusual for a Japanese novel, even a 1987 one).Toru’s narrative of his student years, lived out against a backdrop of ongoing “campus riots,” focuses on the lessons he learns from relationships with several highly individual characters, two of them women he simultaneously loves (or thinks he loves). Mercurial Naoko, who clearly perceives the seeds of her own encroaching madness (“It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself”), continues to tug away at Toru’s emotions even after she enters a sanatorium. Meanwhile, coy fellow student Midori tries to dispel shadows cast by her parents’ painful deaths by fantasizing and simulating—though never actually experiencing—sex with him. Other perspectives on Toru’s hard-won assumption of maturity are offered by older student Nagasawa (“a secret reader of classic novels,” and a compulsive seducer); Naoko’s roommate Reiko, a music teacher (and self-styled interpreter of such Beatles’ songs as the one that provides Murakami’s evocative title) who’s perhaps also her lesbian lover; and the specter of Toru’s boyhood friend Kizuki, a teenaged suicide. There’s a lot of talk about books (particularly Fitzgerald’s and Hesse’s) and other cultural topics, in a blithely discursive and meditative story that’s nevertheless firmly anchored to the here and now by the vibrant immediacy of its closely observed characters and their quite credibly conflicted psyches and libidos.

A contemporary equivalent of This Side of Paradise or Vile Bodies, and another solid building-block in one of contemporary fiction’s most energetic and impressive bodies of work.