Though occasionally slow-moving, this narrative explores major themes of obsession, passion and control.
A novel of obsession—only partially erotic—that spans 50 years of German history, from World War II till the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Alexander von Brücken is old and dying, and as a final dramatic gesture he requests an unnamed novelist to listen to the story of his life and, after his death, to fictionalize these incidents and thus chronicle a lifelong obsession he had with Sofie Kurtz, a girl he originally met when they took shelter together during bombing raids. Several years after the war von Brücken takes over the family business, becomes a millionaire and tries to trace Sofie, who had been lost in postwar chaos. Eventually he discovers her in the village of Wuppertal, where she was living with her stepsister Birgit. Both girls are rivals for the affection of Rolf Schnitgerhans, an attractive, politically active suitor, and Rolf is happy to oblige the two of them. Shortly thereafter the girls’ fates take them down different paths: Birgit becomes a prominent lawyer, gradually becoming more “establishment” after a flirtation with radical politics, while Sofie tries to remain true to her radical roots. She’s finally arrested for taking part in a bank robbery intended to help fund her political leanings. The unfolding of Sofie’s life becomes for von Brücken an idée fixe, and he has Lukian Keferloher, one of his loyal employees, keep her under careful watch—though the plan is somewhat thwarted when Lukian falls in love with her. It turns out that von Brücken is at least as much in love with control as with Sofie and he discovers that “the eroticism of power has seldom been adequately celebrated by writers for the plain and simple reason that hardly any writers have ever possessed power…and felt its thrill for themselves.” By telling his story von Brücken tries to give a sense of that thrill.
Though occasionally slow-moving, this narrative explores major themes of obsession, passion and control.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-933372-58-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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