A contemporary of the French New Novelists, Gombrowicz (Bacacay, 2004, etc.) may well be the missing link between Nikolai...
Like William Blake’s poetry, Gombrowicz’s darkly puckish novel, first published in Poland in 1965, strives to see the world in a mustard seed—and neither the attempt nor the results are pretty.
The narrator, casually identifying himself as Witold, is a student traveling through the Koscieliska region on vacation. Together with Fuks, another student, he finds a sparrow hanging from a tree in the woods outside the rooming house run by the Wojtys family. It’s obviously an omen, but the narrator’s preoccupation with its meaning is only the opening round in a series of ever more puzzling obsessions. He can’t help seeing an unspecified “relation” between the mouth of Katasia, the pension’s housekeeper, misshapen by a car accident but somehow erotic, and the more normal but inseparable mouth of Lena Wojtys, the daughter of the household. He’s fascinated by the wire mesh over an ashtray in the parlor. When Lena points out a crack in the dining room ceiling that looks like an arrow, he finds a remarkably similar arrow in the ceiling of the room he shares with Fuks. Other characters seem scarcely less obsessive. The master of the house constantly coins nonsense words he repeats more and more compulsively. Fuks’s only topic of conversation is his mistreatment by his boss Drozdowski, who never appears. When Lena’s cat is strangled and hanged like the sparrow, the narrator is as bewildered as everyone else. The answer—what answer there is—lies in the future, not the past. Long before the stunningly inconclusive fadeout, though, readers will have given up hope that these monstrous minutiae will ever yield the clear-cut meaning the narrator demands.
A contemporary of the French New Novelists, Gombrowicz (Bacacay, 2004, etc.) may well be the missing link between Nikolai Gogol and Nicholson Baker.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-300-10848-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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