While attempting to be whimsical and delightful, this tiny novel feels just a bit too precious and pleased with itself. In...
When Valerie’s elderly aunt Charlotte goes missing, she must step in to take care of business at the old Ringelnatz & Co. bookstore.
Valerie’s life was on an orderly course until her aunt disappeared, leaving a note that simply said her niece was to manage affairs in her absence. The young woman had been attending business school and enjoyed decent-enough companionship with her boyfriend. When she arrives at Ringelnatz, the shop is a mess. Books are arranged haphazardly, and the accounting system’s nonexistent. There’s also a pregnant rat which oddly doesn’t seem to bother Valerie in the least. In time, she considers the rodent a dear friend, feeding and caring for it like a modern-day Disney princess. In his debut novel, German literary agent Montasser pens a love letter to literature in the form of this story of a bookseller with a magical ability to prescribe just the right book for each of her customers. And one mysterious book—which Valerie initially presumes is defective because of its missing pages—causes the young woman to question what is and is not possible both on and off the page. Through her interactions with customers and letters from satisfied readers, Valerie begins to see the charm amid chaos at Ringelnatz, thus challenging her to reflect on her own life. In a story set in a bookstore, references to authors and literature are to be expected, and this is no exception. But the name-dropping adds little, if anything, to the story. This anemic novel, translated from German, is told by a distant narrator who is sometimes poetic but more often pretentious.
While attempting to be whimsical and delightful, this tiny novel feels just a bit too precious and pleased with itself. In the end, it’s not so special.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-780-74866-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
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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