A fabulist fever dream that is perhaps a bit too opaque.
Professor Q’s “bland, uneventful life” gets shaken up as he’s consumed by his love affair with a doll.
Nevers, a coastal city on Valeria Island, is constantly changing to suit the wants and needs of its colonizers, but underneath the city is a “shadow zone” where the college students are organizing a revolution. Professor Q, a 50-year-old instructor at Lone Boat University, receives a package in the mail with a doll inside. He becomes enamored with the doll, Aliss, in a way he hasn’t felt before. At the encouragement of his mysterious friend Owlish, who tells him, “This could be your last chance for adventure,” he begins an extramarital affair with Aliss. He creates a “love nest” in a church on a nearby abandoned island so his wife, Maria, won’t find out. At first, Aliss is a normal doll, but one day Professor Q leaves a window open and a strange wind blows in, transforming her into an animate being. Professor Q, who was obsessed with her even when she was simply a doll, is delighted by her development of sentience. His relationship with Aliss remains a consistent distraction from the social unrest brewing in Nevers. He barely realizes that his students have gone on strike even though his classes are practically empty. As the book progresses, it becomes unclear how much of what Professor Q experiences is real and how much is imagined. The line between dream and reality becomes increasingly blurred as Professor Q’s sanity comes into question, making things difficult to follow. Chapters 29 and 31 change from a third-person perspective to a second-person narrative addressed to “you” and attempt to unveil some of the obscurities in the story. In the book’s best moments, it’s a wonderfully imaginative fable that resonates with political critique and protest. However, in some areas the book’s vision gets murky, like a dream, which is interesting conceptually but doesn’t quite work here.
A fabulist fever dream that is perhaps a bit too opaque.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781644452356
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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