There’s undoubtedly a great swashbuckling adventure story here, but Kleeberg has failed to unearth it.
This first U.S. publication of the German author is a leaden historical, based on a true story, about the (mostly) charmed life of an 18th-century German baron.
After a confusing start, the fog lifts to reveal a widow and her two children living in poverty in Lorraine, in northern France. The father, a nobleman from Westphalia, has died of consumption. In 1704 the family gains a benefactor, the Count de Mortagne, a courtier at Versailles, who secures a position as a page for the young Theodor von Neuhoff; he is the first of Theodor’s many patrons. The baron is quick to learn the way the court works, and the importance of gossip; his eavesdropping skills land him an assignment in Paris, where he loses his virginity and incurs huge gambling debts (he will be a lifelong spendthrift). From Paris the court sends him to the Hague as a secret agent to contact a high-ranking Swede, in league with the French against the English. Theodor is right at home in this world of complex rivalries, but Kleeberg is a poor guide for 18th-century Europe, a hodgepodge of nation-states, city-states, grand duchies and protectorates, and Theodor is a disappointing protagonist. Not substantial enough to be a hero or anti-hero, he is the consummate dilettante as he shifts allegiance from Sweden to Spain to the House of Habsburg. In the novel’s final third he finds himself in the thick of the struggle between Corsica and the Republic of Genoa, and offers himself to the Corsicans as their King. This brings him fame throughout Europe, but on the eve of his coronation he is still subject to mood swings (“I don’t want to do this anymore”). He eventually resumes his odyssey, and any drama drains out of the narrative in Kleeberg’s recitation of dates and places.
There’s undoubtedly a great swashbuckling adventure story here, but Kleeberg has failed to unearth it.Pub Date: May 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59051-256-2
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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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