A bleak, shattering tale.
An actress relates her own drama.
Award-winning Hungarian writer Szabó (1917-2007) makes her country’s turbulent history the backdrop for her second novel, published in 1959 and newly translated by Rix. During one fateful day in 1954, theater star Eszter Encsy, a woman consumed by hatred and bitterness, recounts the story of her life to someone whose identity is slowly revealed. She was shaped, she shows, by an impoverished childhood in prewar Hungary, the brutal war that broke out when she was 15, and the Soviet takeover in 1948, which turned Hungary into a puppet communist state. Her father was a lawyer, “refined, easy-going, exceptionally cultured,” but prone to giving free advice and turning away potential clients. Instead, he happily devoted himself to horticulture. As the family devolved into poverty, they became, Eszter admits, “a public disgrace.” Supporting the family fell to her mother, who offered piano lessons; and carrying out all the household chores fell to Eszter: “Mother had to take special care of her hands, so I did the shopping, I cooked the supper, I chopped the firewood and dealt with the laundry.” She felt “utterly insignificant” to her parents, who were devoted only to each other; she had no friends. “Everyone hated me,” she recalls, describing herself as “a bad classmate, sour, irritable and riddled with envy.” Her jealousy was focused especially on her classmate Angéla—beautiful, wealthy, and kind; her benevolence incited Eszter’s rage. Eszter boasts that she lies “so easily I could have made a career out of it,” which, as an actress, she actually did; but her confessions of cruelty and spite, of the betrayals and hypocrisy she witnessed, of the hurts she experienced, hardly seem lies but rather evidence of desperate need. Among the many tormented women who people Szabó’s other novels, Eszter stands as most deeply and irreparably wounded by a traumatic past.
A bleak, shattering tale.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781681377377
Page Count: 288
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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