At once baroque in detail and sparely plotted: a pleasurable fantasy that knows what to leave in mystery.
Always-together twins build their doomed city in miniature.
After getting nearly buried with acclaim for his first novel (Observatory Mansions, 2001), British playwright Carey follows up with another odd story, this set in the fictitious town of Entralla. The twins are the granddaughters of the city’s postmaster, an obsessive fellow who spent too much of his time creating miniature buildings (usually of the Central Post Office) out of matchsticks. Alva and Irva’s mother could charitably be called a hermit, and the girls themselves are far from normal. Like some twins, they speak their own language and keep almost completely to themselves, but they also have a private obsession, perhaps inherited from their grandfather: in their dark house, they are constructing a painstakingly detailed model of the entire city. Like many imaginary cities, Entralla is almost more of a character in the story than the people living in it. Each chapter has a tour-book opening, full of ingratiating detail about different Entralla landmarks (and constant reminders that visitors bringing a copy of “this book” into many establishments will receive a ten percent discount). Narrator Alva (who appears to be slightly more socially integrated than Irva) is forever describing this part of the city or that. So obsessed is Alva with maps that she has one of the world tattooed over her entire body. It’s difficult at first to understand how the author’s subtitle could be applied to individuals so troubled and insular, but as the model Entralla becomes more complete and the narrative speaks more and more of earthquakes, it becomes clear what their role will become. That Carey is able to render such a hermetic tale in the bright, vivid colors that splash across its pages is a feat in itself, the fact that he knows when to stop an even bigger one.
At once baroque in detail and sparely plotted: a pleasurable fantasy that knows what to leave in mystery.Pub Date: March 24, 2003
ISBN: 0-15-100782-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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
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