Koeppen (The Hothouse, 2001, etc.), who’s unlike any other writer, produced only five novels in a 60-year career span. But...
An engagingly callow swain pursues the “actress” of his dreams in this previously untranslated 1934 fiction, the first by the great, underrated German author (1902–96).
Banned in Germany in 1936, Koeppen’s tale is an exuberant satire on romantic hyperbole and carnal imbecility, possibly a partial takeoff on Heinrich Mann’s famous novel of obsession, The Blue Angel. Koeppen’s protagonists are Friedrich, a sometime student of literature who works part-time as a tester in a lightbulb factory (lovely irony), and Sibylle, the gorgeous cabaret performer and would-be serious thespian who intoxicates, ensnares, enrages, and delights the tormented—and self-tormenting—Friedrich. He follows her to an unnamed “foreign city” (identified as Zurich in translator Hofmann’s lucid introduction) where she’s performing at a “variety theater,” and endures disillusioning introductions to the several other men with whom Sibylle disports herself: among them a bilious drama critic, a wounded war hero (amusingly named Bosporus), and a charismatic “young Russian who . . . [sings] songs about hunger and revolution.” The story moves from Zurich to Italy, whence Friedrich had invited Sibylle, who sends another woman in her place; and where she eventually does join him, for a frustratingly chaste idyll. Afterward, “Sibylle remained destined for him; Friedrich was the human being who belonged to her. Nothing had changed.” This potentially hermetic and conventional tale is instead a work of extraordinary freshness: Koeppen’s brisk prose (beautifully translated here) renders operatic emotion with urbane precision (Sibylle’s lovers “craved to lie at the foot of her bed like dogs,” etc.), and he brings real intensity and depth to Friedrich’s slavish deference and Sibylle’s determination to become something more than an object of adoration.
Koeppen (The Hothouse, 2001, etc.), who’s unlike any other writer, produced only five novels in a 60-year career span. But they’re all gems, and A Sad Affair is one of the brightest.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05718-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island.” But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared—often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing “anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable,” they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses—or is simply unable—to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion—as modest as a birthday party—do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters’ kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.
When the four adult Madigan children come home for Christmas to visit their widowed mother for the last time before the family house is sold, a familiar landscape of tensions is renewed and reordered.
Newly chosen as Ireland’s first fiction laureate, Enright (The Forgotten Waltz, 2012, etc.) showcases the unostentatious skill that underpins her success and popularity in this latest story of place and connection, set in an unnamed community in County Clare. Rosaleen Considine married beneath her when she took the hand of Pat Madigan decades ago. Their four children are now middle-aged, and only one of them, Constance, stayed local, marrying into the McGrath family, which has benefited comfortably from the nation’s financial boom. Returning to the fold are Dan, originally destined for the priesthood, now living in Toronto, gay and “a raging blank of a human being”; Emmet, the international charity worker struggling with attachment; and Hanna, the disappointed actress with a drinking problem. This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan; or, in the case of the Madigan reunion, “all the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex and drink.” Long introductions to the principal characters precede the theatrical format of the reunion, allowing Enright plenty of space to convey her brilliant ear for dialogue, her soft wit, and piercing, poetic sense of life’s larger abstractions. Like Enright's Man Booker Prize–winning The Gathering (2007), this novel traces experience across generations although, despite a brief crisis, this is a less dramatic story, while abidingly generous and humane.
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.Pub Date: May 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24821-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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