A well-chosen, confidently translated gathering of stories that casts new light on its author.
A fresh, revealing translation of some of the German writer’s now-canonical stories.
In this vigorous new version, Searls emphasizes aspects of Mann's life and work that have not been well aired outside of the scholarly literature. One is Mann’s mixed-race background, including Indigenous and African ancestry through his Brazilian mother, little known to general readers but certainly known to the Nazis who drove him out of Germany. Among other things, Searls holds, this background lent a personal touch to Mann’s insistence that German culture was connected as much to the Mediterranean as to the North Sea. Mann was also unafraid to explore sexuality—and homosexuality—in his works, which drew the wrath of the censors. Finally, Searls argues that Mann is often funny, a fact obscured by rather musty earlier translations, with his humor “far more than the supercilious ‘irony’ he is generally credited with.” Searls takes pains to bring Mann’s decades-old prose to life without anachronism or false breeziness, and where the language is sometimes not quite idiomatic, as when Felix Krull stands alongside his dead father in “Confessions of a Con Artist, by Felix Krull,” it is to point out the German love of abstraction and distance: “I stood at the husk of my progenitor as it grew colder, holding my hand over my eyes, and paid him the copious tribute of my tears.” Krull’s father isn’t quite the scamp his son is, but Krull’s indeed humorous story has Papa selling rotgut champagne, arguing, “I give the people what they believe in.” One character longs to be “a dancer or a cabaret reciter,” tossing out bourgeois convention, while another, decidedly not “a woman of good morals,” is revealed to be canoodling with a young musician. Then, of course, there’s “Death in Venice,” arguably Mann’s most perfectly realized story, with its intimations of mortality on every page, as when its professorial protagonist steps into a gondola “so singularly black, black as otherwise only coffins are.”
A well-chosen, confidently translated gathering of stories that casts new light on its author.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-631-49848-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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