Seven odd little vignettes that add up to a book of beauty.
French author Echenoz has visited American readers several times previously with wry novels such as the recent revision of I’m Gone (2014). This collection of stories is something entirely different. The translator, Coverdale, describes the tales as récits, but Echenoz’s own description is preferable—“little literary objects.” In some of the stories, nothing happens other than a literary description of the landscape for 360 degrees around the writer’s chair (“The Queen’s Caprice”) or a series of walks around a decaying French town that will not see better days again (“Three Sandwiches at Le Bourget”). The collection proceeds with Echenoz’s distinctive voice, and Coverdale appends various endnotes to explain some of the arcane facts he freely inserts into his tales. One of the gems, “Nelson,” is a fair representation of what's at work here. Adm. Nelson sits down to dinner, certainly the center of attention and affection. The admiral’s afflictions and injuries are obliquely unveiled over the course of the evening. When given a newspaper covering the Treaty of Amiens, he “places the page to his left, at an angle, and seems able to read it only in this manner, sideways,” having been blinded in his right eye during the bombardment of Calvi. When Nelson rises from the table between courses, leaving the other guests behind, with quirky elegance Echenoz reveals him taking acorns from his pocket, “retimbering” at the edge of the woods outside. “He has set his heart on planting trees whose trunks will serve to build the future royal fleet.” There is an echo of García Márquez in these simple yet enigmatic pages.
Echenoz gives us a slim series of elegant, tightly written tales, achieving a simple kind of magic.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62097-065-2
Page Count: 128
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.
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A young New York woman figures there’s nothing wrong with existence that a fistful of prescriptions and months of napping wouldn’t fix.
Moshfegh’s prickly fourth book (Homesick for Another World, 2017, etc.) is narrated by an unnamed woman who’s decided to spend a year “hibernating.” She has a few conventional grief issues. (Her parents are both dead, and they’re much on her mind.) And if she’s not mentally ill, she’s certainly severely maladjusted socially. (She quits her job at an art gallery in obnoxious, scatological fashion.) But Moshfegh isn’t interested in grief or mental illness per se. Instead, she means to explore whether there are paths to living that don’t involve traditional (and wearying) habits of consumption, production, and relationships. To highlight that point, most of the people in the narrator's life are offbeat or provisional figures: Reva, her well-meaning but shallow former classmate; Trevor, a boyfriend who only pursues her when he’s on the rebound; and Dr. Tuttle, a wildly incompetent doctor who freely gives random pill samples and presses one drug, Infermiterol, that produces three-day blackouts. None of which is the stuff of comedy. But Moshfegh has a keen sense of everyday absurdities, a deadpan delivery, and such a well-honed sense of irony that the narrator’s predicament never feels tragic; this may be the finest existential novel not written by a French author. (Recovering from one blackout, the narrator thinks, “What had I done? Spent a spa day then gone out clubbing?...Had Reva convinced me to go ‘enjoy myself’ or something just as idiotic?”) Checking out of society the way the narrator does isn’t advisable, but there’s still a peculiar kind of uplift to the story in how it urges second-guessing the nature of our attachments while revealing how hard it is to break them.
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52211-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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