A head-swirling kaleidoscope that, though fictional, is never for a moment fictitious.
The czar is dead. Long live—well, the Stalinist successors of the czar and his court, as proficient as their predecessors at feathering their nests.
“I thought all bloodstains were washed away in Russia”: so, on finding the contrary, marvels Malaparte (The Bird That Swallowed Its Cage: The Selected Writings of Curzio Malaparte, 2012), the German/Italian writer who had the dubious distinction of being on the enemies lists of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin alike. Malaparte may just be the original postmodernist, at least as far as genre-crossing is concerned: his journalism reads like fiction, and his fiction like journalism, and no cataloger can ever be quite sure of where to shelve books such as his best-known work, Kaputt (1944). So it is with this book, which he prefaces with the remark that “in this novel…everything is true: the people, the events, the things, the places.” Why a novel, then? Well, Malaparte has been dead since 1957, so it must remain a mystery, except to hazard that just as Kenneth Rexroth called his true An Autobiographical Novel such to get the lawyers off his back, Malaparte may have been hoping to lessen the wrath of the Politburo. He needn’t have tried, for from the opening page there’s plenty here to sustain the ire of an apparatchik. Malaparte begins by lampooning the “communist nobility,” a demimonde of high-heel–clad actresses and vodka-guzzling cultural commissars. Within a few dozen pages he has evolved into a political philosopher, noting—and worth considering for our own time—that the downtrodden masses will support tyrants beyond all reason, albeit “the torment that oppresses the masses in a revolution is their obsession with betrayal.” Others who appear here have different obsessions, among them the quietly subversive novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, who tells Malaparte, “I am afraid of Christ,” even as Malaparte later reckons that the greatest sin of the proletarian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was that “Mayakovsky believed in God.”
A head-swirling kaleidoscope that, though fictional, is never for a moment fictitious.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68137-209-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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