A very slim, very French novella about conspiracy, coincidence and mortality.
Celebrated in his native France for his category-defying fiction that encompasses mystery, sci-fi, fantasy and philosophy, Belletto (Dying, 2010, etc.) receives only his third English translation with a narrative that the foreword by Stacey Levin describes as “a strange jewel,” “a work that hovers mysteriously between reality and artifice, natural and supernatural,” and “a puzzle.” It opens provocatively enough: “It is to me that we owe our immortality, and this is the story that proves it beyond all doubt.” Such proof, which involves a dictionary, doesn’t come until the novel’s very end. Before then is the first-person narrative of a man whose wife has been murdered, leaving him with a 6-year-old daughter whom he loves as his entire world. The daughter’s name is Anna, the wife was named Maria and the narrator goes unnamed, though one character refers to him as “my dear X.” The narrator lets his daughter visit with her maternal grandparents, who suspect him of having killed their daughter (and may have mixed feelings toward their granddaughter as a result). Another subplot involves a type of perpetual-motion machine, developed by the narrator’s father, which can only sustain its momentum for 24 hours. “Nothing perpetual, alas, except inertia,” says the narrator. The novel pivots on the discovery of some frozen clams in the narrator’s refrigerator, triggering his suspicion because he doesn’t know the brand and doesn’t like clams. As he starts to play amateur detective, one revelation leads to another, and the narrator finds himself at the birthday party of an old school friend, where he connects with a beautiful woman, whom nobody seems to know, and ultimately reunites with the friend’s sister, who wasn’t at the party. More mystery ensues, through what the narrator describes as a "series of coincidences and misunderstandings,” though admitting that “it was as if my mind were that of an insane person, closed to the outside world.” Fans of Paul Auster’s brand of literary gamesmanship will recognize a kindred spirit here.
Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-2441-4
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"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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