From the vagaries of desire, through parental love and its absence, to small-town morality, the British author has put...
A comedy of errors in rural Wales evolves into a dark tale of family secrets in this very accomplished debut.
Picture a pretty girl in a yellow dress, presiding over a picnic on a spring day. It’s enough to scramble a fellow’s brains, and so, brains duly scrambled, Wilfred Price proposes to Grace Reece, who accepts in a flash. Moments later, Wilfred is appalled by his folly. The 27-year-old undertaker barely knows the doctor’s daughter, though they have grown up together in the small town of Narberth, Pembrokeshire, where it’s now 1924. Blame it on his inexperience with the ladies; Wilfred is still a virgin. His subsequent retraction falls on deaf ears. On another front, he’s having better luck. Flora lives with her mother in a nearby town; her father has died suddenly, and Wilfred has arranged the funeral. Despite the awkward circumstances, their strong mutual attraction leads to a wordless tryst, tender but not carnal, in a deserted seaside cottage. Meanwhile, Grace is becoming desperate: She’s pregnant. Her suppressed memory of being raped surfaces, but she can't divulge the identity of the rapist to her cold, forbidding parents. After considering suicide, she simply tells her father she’s pregnant, and the doctor, assuming Wilfred’s guilt, bullies the young man into a joyless civil ceremony. If he denies paternity, no one will believe him, his business will fail, and he will be forced to leave town without his widowed gravedigger father, an impossibility, for the two are devoted to each other. Jones has devised her trap skillfully. Though the novel’s first, pre-marriage half dawdles, and the Wilfred/Flora relationship is too gauzy, the second half is exceptionally strong. Wilfred and Grace discover reserves of courage even as their world grows bleak.
From the vagaries of desire, through parental love and its absence, to small-town morality, the British author has put together a thematically rich book in a perfectly rendered time and place.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60945-185-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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