A brilliant fusion of satire, science fiction, and political commentary. Gogol is probably tearing his hair out, wishing...
An inventive first novel briskly reimagines 20th-century Russian history.
The story’s first half (titled “Pre-”) is set in 1910, at the remote railway station in Astapovo where Count Leo Tolstoy, having fled his estate, lies dying. The world beats a path to Astapovo. Young cinematographer Nikolai Gribshin works with the “Pathé frères” news service, which hopes to film the revered writer’s final hours. A Dr. Strangelovian scientist, Professor Vorobev, offers to apply to the moribund Count his newly perfected technique for preserving “the qualities of the vital force in a dead animal”—as evidenced by the stuffed rat Vorobev carries everywhere with him. And, in the wake of the failed 1905 Revolution, comrades Lenin and Stalin scheme to share in the world attention focused on Astapovo, reasoning that “in the right hands, the Count can be transformed into a revolutionary hero. . . .” The rich comedy of these early scenes is skillfully darkened in the second half (entitled “Post-”), which takes place in 1919, after WWI and the successful October Revolution have totally altered the political and economic landscape. Kalfus (stories: PU-239, 1999, etc.) now turns his attention to pseudonymous “Comrade Astapov” (whom we’ve met previously), a veteran of the European War and connoisseur of the still-developing art of cinema, whose technical knowledge is now employed by the eponymous Commissariat, a recently formed ministry entrusted with reshaping all art forms in a manner suitable for the supposedly obedient (often recalcitrant) masses. Astapov’s duties lead to an unexpected reunion with Professor Vorobev (madder than ever) and a climactic effort to “revive” the Soviet Party (so to speak) that will cast bizarre shadows over the eagerly anticipated “glorious future.”
A brilliant fusion of satire, science fiction, and political commentary. Gogol is probably tearing his hair out, wishing he’d dreamed this up.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-050136-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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