Overlong and woodenly earnest, without the leavening wit of Rindell’s The Other Typist (2013), the novel does cohere in its...
Harry Yamada and Louis Thorn work together as stunt pilots—close but competitive friends—until World War II upends their lives.
In 1943, an FBI agent named Bonner arrives in Newcastle, California. He's investigating Harry Yamada and his father, Kenichi, who've recently escaped from an internment camp for Japanese-Americans, and wants to know if they've returned to the farm they signed over at the war’s outbreak to their neighbor Louis Thorn, at the time Harry’s flying partner and now a flight instructor for the Air Corps. As Bonner questions 23-year-old Louis on his front porch, the two men are shocked to watch a plane fall out of the sky in a fiery crash. Inside are two bodies, one identifiable as Kenichi, the other charred beyond recognition but assumed to be Harry. Not long afterward, Ava Brooks, who has supposedly been helping Louis care for the Yamadas' orchard, turns up at the house. Soon the novel is moving back and forth in time, interspersing Bonner’s investigation of the crash with the evolving prewar love triangle of Louis, Harry, and Ada—who met in 1940 when the two young pilots joined Ada’s con-artist stepfather’s barnstorming troupe—as well as with the history of the multigenerational feud between the Yamadas, portrayed as upstanding, almost saintly immigrants, and the struggling, less sympathetic Thorns. Bonner’s growing obsession with the case and the mysterious sexual attention he enjoys from the young landlady of a Newcastle boardinghouse are two of the contrived threads with which Rindell (Three-Martini Lunch, 2016, etc.) eventually ties up the flimsy plot. While the Yamadas’ unfair treatment clearly alludes to today’s immigrant experience, what is more developed is the character study of Louis Thorn, who faces conflicted loyalties and complex moral choices.
Overlong and woodenly earnest, without the leavening wit of Rindell’s The Other Typist (2013), the novel does cohere in its attempt to plumb the complexities of love and hate.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-18429-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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