First published in 1991, this provocative parable is the 12th novel to reach English from the internationally acclaimed author of such fiction as Badenheim 1939 (1980) and (most recently) The Iron Tracks (1998). Protagonist Karl HÅbner is an Austrian Jew who has, with his mother’s blessing, converted to Christianity in order to facilitate his advancement as a municipal official employed by the city of Neufeld. No sooner has Karl accepted congratulations at his “conversion ceremony,” though, than nagging reminders of his late parents and of his religious heritage begin to shake his resolve to settle smoothly into his chosen new life. His oldest friend, an earlier convert, exemplifies embittered unfulfillment. His “scandalous” Aunt Franzi, a former cabaret singer and actress—and a forthright “proud Jew and . . . woman of principle”—dies suddenly, a visit to her provincial hometown tellingly evoking Karl’s untroubled childhood. And, crucially, his memories of Gloria, the housemaid who nursed his parents during the last illness of each, compel him to seek her out. His reunion with Gloria, and his chastened gratitude for her devotion to his loved ones (“She had absorbed their lives fully while he was merely a drifter in their world”), unite the two and show Karl a pathway back to his origins when an injustice orchestrated by the government he serves (the abolition of his city’s Jewish market area) forces him to abandon the position he had coveted and won. He and Gloria return to the Ruthenian mountains to live simply, but they can—t escape the fate to which Karl had believed himself immune. Their story’s conclusion is swift, impersonal, and devastating. The weakness of The Conversion is its tendency toward dogmatic allegory (at times we suspect Appelfeld is jury-rigging a thinly fictionalized argument against assimilation into other cultures as opposed to accepting one’s native ethnicity). But its signal strength—his complex portrayal of a divided soul frustrated in its pursuit of goodness—once again confirms Appelfeld’s position as matchless dramatist of the intermingled burdens and rewards of Jewry in extremis.
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1998
ISBN: 0-8052-4153-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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