This haunting book doesn’t try to sort out Ludwig’s internal life, it just places the reader in the middle.
The poet Philip Larkin’s famous observation that your mom and dad really mess you up is aptly illustrated in this offbeat, atmospheric novel by Dutch author Wieringa (Joe Speedboat, 2010, etc.). Though the narrative takes awhile to reveal itself, the book is ultimately about the psychological damage inflicted on Ludwig Unger, a gifted young pianist, by his absent father and manipulative yet seductive mother, Marthe.
Ludwig’s relationship with Marthe is initially peaceful, if sensually charged; their bonding ritual involves her dressing him in her clothes and painting his face with makeup. Their almost-romance is breached when he learns—improbably, not until his teens—of her previous life as Eve LeSage, a world-famous star of pornographic films. Neither of them tries to understand why Ludwig is so enraged; she returns to California and resumes her career while Ludwig drifts passively through relationships with a string of women. Marthe remains in control during the book’s final third, when she is diagnosed with an early, still-curable form of breast cancer and against Ludwig’s wishes, refuses anything but ineffective alternative treatments. Her death is long and painful; in a metaphor perhaps too obvious, one of her last gestures is to grab Ludwig at her bedside and attempt to bite into his neck. The book leaves Ludwig with the overdue possibility of a future, after he’s lost Marthe and provoked a cathartic physical confrontation with his father. Because the action in the story is largely internal, the book’s pace can be frustrating—as can Ludwig himself, when he deserts a woman who’s an obvious lifeline in order to sink deeper into co-dependency.
This haunting book doesn’t try to sort out Ludwig’s internal life, it just places the reader in the middle.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2049-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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