by Tom Malmquist ; translated by Henning Koch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 30, 2018
A deeply emotional and affecting novel.
A Swedish woman becomes deathly ill as she is about to give birth to her first child, and her longtime partner must learn to traverse parenthood and grief at the same time.
When Karin is 33 weeks pregnant and struggling to breathe, her partner and fellow writer, Tom, rushes her to a nearby hospital. Karin is diagnosed with acute leukemia, and a baby girl she names Livia is delivered by emergency C-section. Tom struggles to be present for his premature daughter as Karin becomes increasingly unresponsive over the next few weeks in the hospital. Translated from the Swedish by Koch, the first part of Malmquist’s autobiographical novel moves swiftly through hospital passages, and the days meld together in his prose. Like Tom, we are plunged into medical terminology and family tensions that build in urgency until Karin’s death. After her loss, the narrative begins to piece together memories of Tom and Karin’s life together before the illness. These sections are often untethered from each other, out of chronological order, as if fragments from a dream; it is in this part of the book that Malmquist’s background as a poet shines through, even as the heaviness of the memories is often suffocating. Tom’s efforts to care for Livia and navigate his other familial relationships are woven between these flashbacks from his courtship with Karin and her earlier health scares. Tom works through the complicated bureaucratic system to establish his legal relationship with Livia, as he and Karin weren't married; he struggles to resolve tensions with Karin’s parents due to the privacy she wanted during her illness; and his own father’s health rapidly declines after 10 years of living with cancer. By turns raw, unsettled, and touching, Malmquist's book is an extended meditation on what it means to love and to mourn.
A deeply emotional and affecting novel.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61219-711-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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by Percival Everett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 21, 2001
More genuine and tender than much of Everett's previous work, but no less impressive intellectually: a high point in an...
Desperation outstrips the satire in Everett's latest exercise in narrative wizardry (Glyph, 1999, etc.), as a lonely African-American writer faces private torment and instant fame when his parody of ghetto literature is taken as the real deal.
His own generation's version of an invisible man, Thelonious Ellison, a.k.a. Monk, is a largely unknown academic novelist who visits hometown Washington, D.C., to give a paper and see his mother and sister. No sooner does he return to California than Sis, a doctor in an abortion clinic, is shot dead at work. Someone has to take care of Mom, who's showing the first wrenching signs of Alzheimer's, so Monk returns home. There, his frustration with a runaway bestseller written in ghettospeak by a bourgeois black woman after visiting Harlem for a couple of days is fueled by endless rejections of his own new manuscript; in a rage he pumps out a parody and sends it under a pseudonym to his agent—who promptly secures a six-figure advance and a seven-figure movie deal. Stunned that no one recognizes his book as a send-up, Monk refuses to let his true identity be known. Meanwhile, he must cope with his mother's rapid decline, his gay brother's sudden animosity, and the discovery among his father's papers of letters indicating not only that Dad had a white mistress long ago, but that Monk has a half-sister his age. Struggling to maintain his own identity as his creation looms larger than life and his family redefines itself, he makes choices that render him invisible no more.
More genuine and tender than much of Everett's previous work, but no less impressive intellectually: a high point in an already substantial literary career.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2001
ISBN: 1-58465-090-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Cormac McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2006
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
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Pulitzer Prize Winner
National Book Critics Circle Finalist
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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