An exciting debut, if still in the process of formation.
A spirited debut embodies an intrinsic, disjointed portrait of a poor black street in L.A. pre the ’92 riots.
A motley collection of its hardscrabble residents tell the up-and-down story of Piedmont Street, named for the 19th-century lawyer who rid the area of “plaguing canine hordes,” according to one chapter’s “Official History.” The first citizen to set the ominous scene is Daniel, hustler turned preacher, who has been called by God—literally, out of bed one morning—to pound the pavement declaring His Word to indifferent and increasingly hostile sinners. He reappears from another angle as the odd, dreaded Uncle Daniel in “A Knock on the Door/Louise,” where he makes his increasingly ghastly appearance on Sunday before dinner to lecture his nieces on the Lord’s “divine plan.” Another local denizen who recounts her plight is piano teacher Cecile; having fallen on “a hard time (only temporary she was sure),” she is forced to line up at the pawnshop to sell her cherished Auntie’s moonstone brooch. The experience of dealing with the miserly pawnbroker becomes a creepy prefiguration of her fall from grace—and the cataclysmic fire that will follow. Some of these folksy character studies feel like complete short stories in themselves: “Red Lipstick/Albee & Lettie,” for example, about the impending meeting after many years of two middle-aged sisters, one healthy and Christian, the other prodigal and ailing, who are destined to rehash their smoldering family dynamic until death; or “Eve’s Daughter/Bernadette,” about the struggling seamstress Bernadette, who pulled herself out of poverty and away from her mother’s curse of morbidity by opening her own shop on Piedmont Street; now, fatigued by surviving her loved ones, she watches the signs of doom slowly appear in the area. The self-sufficient pieces can’t—not tidily—be tacked together to make a cohesive work, yet Barnes’s spare writing and poignant detail render her characters memorable.
An exciting debut, if still in the process of formation.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-932511-18-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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