A dark but charming portrait of a man unmoored by his love of an artist.
Japanese novelist Tawada, who lives in Berlin, observes a scholar’s obsession with a poet.
When does an interest become an obsession? A pathology? For the central character of Tawada’s Covid-19-era novella, problems come to light after his interest becomes a job. Patrik—more often referred to as “the patient”—is a literature scholar in the midst of a mental breakdown. The object of Patrik’s work, and of his obsession, is the 20th-century Romania-born Jewish poet Paul Celan (1920-1970). In his thoughts and conversations, Patrik references endless minutiae of the poet’s work, including his preoccupations with Zen and Kabbalah. For Patrik, Celan takes on a similar mystical significance—no detail small enough to escape notice, nothing in life too mundane to connect back to his work. Patrik aspires to “give a lecture in which he revealed the significance of every single letter Celan used in his poetry,” but he’s hobbled by his mental illness, which largely prevents him from leaving home. When he does, the patient suffers absurd compulsions, such as an inability to turn right at intersections or to order at a café. After a server offers a drink, he complains: “Why grapefruit juice? The grapefruit available in Berlin is mostly imported from Israel. Celan didn’t go to Israel until 1969.” Although he insists that “Patrik is different from the patient,” the line between them is undefined. The narrative embodies his alienation by fluctuating between first and third person and traversing fragmented timelines. What results is an inventive homage to modernist literature, wrapped up in an unexpectedly personal depiction of illness. Although the patient’s problems appear to be psychological, they manifest in his physicality: “I ought to leave my body to its own devices, it can lead a healthier life without me,” he says. “…I’ll stop trying to read my partial, physical pain. Instead, I’ll read Celan.”
A dark but charming portrait of a man unmoored by his love of an artist.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780811234870
Page Count: 144
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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