Unconventional and memorable.
Age-indeterminate Hiroshima survivor and 20-something librarian form an unlikely alliance while studying cloud-seekers in Audeguy’s debut.
The shadow of W.B. Sebald looms like cumulonimbus over this novel. In his Paris hôtel particulier with its glassed-in third story, Japanese designer Akira Kumo is briefing Virginie, whom he’s hired to catalogue his considerable archive on the science and art of cloud observation. Structured as a series of tales exchanged by the pair, the action ranges across two centuries of weather, depicting Quaker missionary Howard, the first man to classify clouds (c. 1802), Carmichael, whose sky paintings eventually drove him mad, and most exhaustively, Richard Abercrombie, an explorer and scientist who journeyed the globe hoping to best his rival, Williamsson, with a photographic atlas of world climates. A mushroom cloud has shaped Kumo’s life: His true age (in 2005) could be anything from 71 to 80-plus, due to destroyed birth records, his suppressed memories and his compulsion to continually start anew. Gradually the truth emerges: His parents died in air raids, and his sister was vaporized by the bomb at Hiroshima—Kumo was saved because he was skinny-dipping in a pond. He sends Virginie to London to scout out the missing lynchpin of his collection: the fabled Abercrombie Protocol, supposedly the compendium Abercrombie completed after his world tour. After a brief affair with Abercrombie’s grandson, Virginie secures the Protocol. She returns to Paris to find Kumo wheelchair-bound after an abortive suicide leap off his balcony. The Protocol chronicles Abercrombie’s disillusionment in a Borneo jungle as he witnesses the death of a noble orangutan at the hands of boorish Englishmen. Abercrombie, a 49-year-old virgin, becomes a determined libertine: The Protocol, it will appear, is largely photographs of women’s genitalia. Bent’s supple translation enlivens potentially dry meteorological meditations. Readers might wish for more stage time with Kumo and Virginie, which is not possible in a novel that exalts intersecting motifs over character.
Unconventional and memorable.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-15-101428-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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