Nabokov’s predator blamed his prey; Rijneveld’s seeks to blame love.
A dairy farm, again, provides the mordant backdrop for trauma in Dutch poet Rijneveld’s startling second novel exploring loss, escape, and boundaries.
An unnamed middle-aged veterinarian recounts his version of the ill-fated relationship he cultivated with a 14-year-old girl with whom he was (and is) enamored. The unnamed idealized girl becomes, in disturbing and violent ways, the focus of his fantasies and actions over the course of the summer of 2005. A complex character, the girl—who refers to herself as Little Bird—is quirky, misunderstood, prone to self-destructive fantasy, seemingly motherless and living in a stultifying household with her brother and father. Her and the veterinarian’s relationship—on a complete collision course with the realistic and the appropriate—may be driven by his need to relive or reinvent his own youth, marred by unseemly sexual attention from his mother. Rijneveld (who won the 2020 International Booker Prize for a previous portrait of childhood trauma, The Discomfort of Evening, also translated by Hutchison) delivers the veterinarian’s meandering soliloquy in the style of a Beat poem, with hypnotic effect, via page-long sentences and chapter-length paragraphs. Replete with references to pop culture, rock music, and current events, the fantastical account is grounded in real possibility, making it all the more menacing; this ogre is a neighbor, and he doesn’t mind being referred to as Kurt (à la Cobain). Worse, he has found a receptive and needy audience, greedy for attention. His catalog of things he fantasizes about doing, and eventually does, to the object of his misdirected longings will evoke trigger warnings and debate from readers who, as scene after scene of predatory behavior unfolds, could be forgiven for feeling assaulted themselves.
Nabokov’s predator blamed his prey; Rijneveld’s seeks to blame love.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-64445-273-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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