On balance, though, too far over the top to persuade us of its (supposedly) larger-than-life characters' reality. `Love is...
An intense but ultimately disappointing fourth novel from Sanchez (Mile Zero, 1989, etc.), this time about a passionate love that long outlasts WWII, which separates a famed Spanish artist from his French mistress.
An unnamed art historian sedulously assembles the piecemeal legacy of expressionistic painter Francisco Zermano's affair with Louise Collard from several packets of letters—ones exchanged by the pair, and others written but unsent by Collard—discovered in Provence long after the war. The correspondence traces the history of their relationship (frequently in blatantly expository fashion) and records Louise's experiences as an initially unwilling member of the Resistance (under the thumb of a lustful `postal official` who releases letters from Zermano to her in return for clandestine messenger service). And, alas, it preserves the lovers' ludicrously hyperbolic declarations of their torrential feelings (Francisco’s `I rip the sky, I bray at the moon` is only too typical): romantic apostrophizing probably meant to make us think of Hemingway's Frederic and Catherine of A Farewell to Arms, but more likely to conjure up images of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. Day of the Bees is by no means all bad. The tense episode from which its title derives is presented with icy realistic and symbolic precision; Sanchez's imaginative descriptions of Francisco's crowded canvases have real power; and both the subplot evoking the figure of a 14th-century scholar who may have inspired Zermano's `amor fou` and the climax in Mallorca—where its narrator meets the aged artist and offers him confirmation of Louise's undying love for him—are likewise admirably handled sequences.
On balance, though, too far over the top to persuade us of its (supposedly) larger-than-life characters' reality. `Love is always a mutilation of the self,` Zermano intones at one particularly emotional moment. In this novel, it's also a noisy, grandiose distraction.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40162-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A compelling exploration of self, family, love, and the power of new beginnings.
After a year in a coma, Annie Rush wakes up to a world without her husband, the TV she developed, and a wealth of memories that put her life into context, but as her body and mind heal, she puts her faith in second chances.
As a successful cooking-show producer who’s married to the gorgeous star, Annie knows she’s lucky, so she overlooks the occasional arguments and her husband’s penchant for eclipsing her. She’s especially excited the day she finds out she’s pregnant and, ignoring her typical steadfast schedule, rushes to the set to tell him. And discovers him making love to his onscreen assistant. Stunned, Annie leaves, trying to figure out her next move, and is struck on the head by falling on-set machinery. She wakes a year later in her Vermont hometown, as weak as a kitten and suffering from amnesia. As the days pass, however, she finds clues and markers regarding her life, and many of her memories begin to fill in. She remembers Fletcher, the first boy she loved, and how their timing was always off. She wanted to leave her family’s maple farm behind and explore the world—especially once her cooking-themed film school project was discovered and she was enfolded into the LA world of a successful food show. Fletcher intended to follow her, until life created big roadblocks for their relationship that they could never manage to overcome. Now, however, Annie’s husband has divorced her while Fletcher has settled in Switchback, and just as things look like they may finally click for Fletcher and Annie, her pre-accident life comes calling again. Wiggs (Starlight on Willow Lake, 2015, etc.) examines one woman’s journey into losing everything and then winning it all back through rediscovering her passions and being true to herself, tackling a complicated dual storyline with her typical blend of authenticity and sensitivity.
A compelling exploration of self, family, love, and the power of new beginnings.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-242543-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Although this novel’s reach exceeds its grasp, it is a necessary book.
On an island off the South Korean coast, an ancient guild of women divers reckons with the depredations of modernity from 1938 to 2008 in See's (The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, 2017, etc.) latest novel.
The women divers of Jeju Island, known as haenyeo, don't display the usual female subservience. Empowered by the income they derive from their diving, harvesting seafood to consume and sell, haenyeo are heads of households; their husbands mind the children and do menial chores. Young-sook, See’s first-person narrator and protagonist, tells of her family and her ill-fated friendship with Mi-ja, who, rescued from neglectful relatives by Sun-sil, Young-sook’s mother, is initiated into the diving collective headed by Sun-sil. The girls grow up together, dive together, and go on lucrative assignments in the freezing waters near Vladivostok, Russia. They are also married off together, Mi-ja to Sang-mun, who, as World War II progresses, is enriched by collaborating with the Japanese, and Young-sook to Jun-bu, a neighbor and childhood playmate. The novel’s first half is anecdotal and a little tedious as the minutiae of the haenyeo craft are explored: free diving, pre-wetsuit diving garb, and sumbisori, the art of held breath. As two tragedies prove, the most prized catches are the riskiest: octopus and abalone. See did extensive research with primary sources to detail not only the haenyeo traditions, but the mass murders on Jeju beginning in 1948, which were covered up for decades by the South Korean government. As Jeju villages are decimated, Young-sook loses half her family and also, due to a terrible betrayal, her friendship with Mi-ja. The tangled web of politics and tyranny, not to mention the inaction of U.N. and American occupiers leading up to the massacres, deserves its own work, perhaps nonfiction. In the context of such horrors, the novel’s main source of suspense, whether Young-sook can forgive Mi-ja, seems beside the point.
Although this novel’s reach exceeds its grasp, it is a necessary book.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5485-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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