Greg’s masterful first novel is charming, seductive, and sinister by turns.
An autobiographical novel about a young girl growing up in a small Polish village.
Greg (Finite Formulae and Theories of Chance, 2014, etc.) has published several volumes of poetry and been translated into at least five different languages. Her first book of prose, an autobiographical novel (or a fictionalized memoir), was received to great acclaim in the U.K. and was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. The book’s appearance in the U.S. is a great gift. The novel describes Greg’s childhood and early adolescence in a small Polish village in the 1970s and '80s. It is composed of short, vivid chapters that glisten and gleam, clicking one behind the other like pearls on a string. In one, Wiola (as she is called here) anticipates a visit from the pope to their village—really, he will just be driving through, but the village women eagerly prepare bunting to welcome him. Just as the bunting has been finished, however, a crowd of men arrives to destroy it: these are communist times, after all. Greg’s ability to describe moments of great historical, political, and cultural importance through the eyes of a child is wonderful. She remains focused on her young protagonist even as the Soviet Union splinters around her. Even better is Greg’s emphasis on bright, almost otherworldly images that crop up throughout these chapters. Wiola’s father practices taxidermy in his spare time; one day, after completing a project, he falls asleep on the sofa: “The goshawk, with its artificially spread wings, soared above him.” Later, her father dies, but before he does, Wiola notices “the shadow of a queen bee flicker[ing] in the window.” The images give the novel a fairy-tale quality, as does the threat of sexual violence, which echoes throughout several chapters.
Greg’s masterful first novel is charming, seductive, and sinister by turns.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945492-04-4
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Transit Books
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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