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FALLING SIDEWAYS

A clever spoof about work and the relationships formed there.

A week in the life of a group of worker bees whose firm is becoming unhinged.

Copenhagen-based expatriate Kennedy (In the Company of Angels, 2010, etc.) can be an acquired taste. But this second book in his Copenhagen Quartet is probably one of his most accessible. Like other workplace satires, the novel fashions the workplace as fishbowl and invites the reader to examine the flora and fauna within. Those who work at the Tank, a firm so mind-numbing that it’s difficult to tell what the company does at all, are a mixed bag. Anxious executive Frederick Breathwaite is ready to shoot himself in the foot financially in order to ensure a spot at the company for his rebellious son, Jes. CEO Martin Kampman puts on a fierce face at work even as he struggles on the home front. Harald Jaeger is the office ladies’ man whose passionate exterior belies his unrequited love for Birgitte Sommer, his married colleague. Assorted other figures, ranging from the office curmudgeon to the Afghan owners of a local fix-it shop, fill out an eccentric cast. Kennedy has fun with his locale-specific commentary; in one scene, a doctor advises Harald that his hearing is fine—Danes just tend to mumble when they’re afraid of being quoted. But where the novel truly succeeds is in its depictions of relationships, whether it’s Harald’s hesitant romance or the odd friendship between sons Jes Breathwaite and Adam Kampman. In the end, what lies beneath is just as important as that which we see on the surface. “And you know what happens when you have a life without a foundation?” Jes warns. “It runs along okay for a while until one day you look down and see there’s nothing beneath you and you fall.”

A clever spoof about work and the relationships formed there.

Pub Date: March 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-60819-081-2

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010

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OF MICE AND MEN

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

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.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936

ISBN: 0140177396

Page Count: 83

Publisher: Covici, Friede

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936

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  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist


  • Pulitzer Prize Winner

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THE ROAD

A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.

Awards & Accolades

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  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist


  • Pulitzer Prize Winner

Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.

McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.

A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.

Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006

ISBN: 0-307-26543-9

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006

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