Feather light but oddly compelling.
French playwright and novelist Reza, best known in America for her 2009 Tony Award–winning play, God of Carnage, offers 20 scenes to show the interlocking lives of various Parisian spouses, lovers, parents, children and friends.
Although the title derives from a Borges poem, the intellectual pretentions do not weigh as heavily as they might; the scenes are brief, with limited punctuation and no paragraphing—as if to emphasize the evanescence and rapidly changing nature of relationships. No one is exactly the central protagonist here, but the opening belongs to the most frequently seen characters, Robert and Odile Toscano, whose push-pull of irritation and attraction during an argument over car keys represents the universal state of marriage. In a later scene, Robert grouses after the couple attends a party hosted by Remi, a lawyer who turns out to be Odile’s lover. Remi is acquainted with professional gambler Yorgos, whose friend Raoul played cards with Odile’s father, Ernest Blot, to help him recover from depression after a coronary bypass. Ernest’s sister, Marguerite, a Spanish professor, may be hopelessly in love with a colleague, but she seems like a strong woman compared to Ernest’s wife, Jeannette, when they clothes shop together after Jeannette’s 70th birthday party. And then there are Robert’s friends Luc and Lionel, who tells the other two the secret reason he and his wife, Pascaline, seem so devoted: Their son, Jacob, is in a mental hospital because he believes he's Céline Dion. Raoul’s wife, Hélène, runs into Igor, Jacob's psychiatrist, with whom she has an erotic history. And so the relationships unspool and reknot scene after scene to include a professionally caring, personally demented oncologist; unhappy mistresses; wives; mothers and children. The difficulty in keeping track of the names seems to be purposeful, a complex game of matching up characters in various patterns as lives sometimes crisscross, sometimes run parallel, until the Toscanos take center stage again in a funeral finale that brings everyone into new relief.
Feather light but oddly compelling.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-509515-692-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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