Don't read this book while eating—but don’t skip these unflinching, intelligent stories, either.
Dark and visceral tales shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
If the first story of a collection is meant to set the tone for the whole volume, then “The Head,” the opener to South Korean author Chung’s first work to be translated into English, is a doozy. A young woman is beset by a talking head in her toilet, made from, as the head tells the woman, “the things you dumped down the toilet, like your fallen-out hair and feces and toilet paper you used to wipe your behind.” No matter how the woman tries to silence or destroy the head, it grows and disrupts her life through courtship, marriage, and the birth of her daughter. If it seems surprising that an institution like the Booker Prize would go for gross-out body horror, one need only consider the deft social commentary that underpins Chung’s tales. In “The Embodiment,” for example, a single woman ends up pregnant from taking too much birth control medication and then is warned by her obstetrician that if she doesn’t find a father for her unborn child, the consequences could be dire. (Spoiler: They are.) Women’s bodies are literally disfigured by social expectations or cultural pressures; children are destroyed by the cruel whims of adults. Money, old age, technology, and intergenerational trauma ruin plenty of things here, too. In the title story, the family business—the making of cursed fetish objects—is passed down through the generations, with one particularly disastrous rabbit lamp wreaking havoc on its greedy recipient. Whether borrowing from fable, folktale, speculative fiction, science fiction, or horror, Chung’s stories corkscrew toward devastating conclusions—bleak, yes, but also wise and honest about the nightmares of contemporary life.
Don't read this book while eating—but don’t skip these unflinching, intelligent stories, either.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64375-360-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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