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David Grossman, author of See Under: Love and To the End of the Land, offers another exceptionally fine work, about the costs of unconditional love. Based on a true story, the novel concerns three generations of Israelis.The grandmother, Vera, having lost her first husband, arrives at a kibbutz and, resignedly, marries Tuvia, a kibbutz resident. Her difficult, elusive daughter Nina, (whom Vera abandoned when she was six) and Tuvia’s son Raphael become involved and marry (their daughter, Gili, a film professional, narrates the novel, and film plays a big part in the story.). Then Nina disappears, leaving no word, still hopelessly loved by Raphael; she reappears enigmatically, years later at her grandmother’s 90th birthday party, and it becomes clear how much things have changed in her life. In a quest for closure and clarity, Vera, Nina, Rafael, and Gili embark upon a visit to the island where Nina spent years in a work camp, and we begin to understand the indelible impact of history and inhumanitiy on the lives of these vividly-portrayed people we grow to care about. Although it's emotionally difficult at times, this is one of the most memorable and haunting novels in recent years, subtle in its understanding of nonverbal micro-awareness, and written with precision, compassion, and restraint.
Like many fine recent novels, from Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy to Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, Matrix is set in pre-modern times. As the story opens in the twelfth century, an ungainly young woman of 17 named Marie has been sent from the court of France to an abbey in an uninviting corner of England, in what amounts to exile. The living conditions are miserable, but Marie is possessed of a mind that can see what might be as well as what is. She is visited with visions that tell her how to improve the lot of the community—many of them involving daring, complex, and far-reaching material changes. Marie’s career—there is no other word for it—at the Abbey spans decades, encompassing changes large and small, inner and outer, and Marie becomes a very different woman in the process. Lauren Groff’s writing is precise and remarkably moving without sentimentality. An engrossing and beautiful novel.
Fast-paced and utterly absorbing, The Blacktongue Thief is narrated by a likeable rogue named Kinch Na Shannack, a trained thief--one who owes his trainers a lot of money. He tries to rob a magical woman on a quest, and ends up questing right alongside her. They move west, sometimes by land, chased by goblins, sometimes by sea, capsized by krakens.Then there are giants. But this quick inventory doesn’t begin to convey Kinch’s voice and presence—sardonic, disillusioned, profane, honest after a fashion, smart, lustful—he’s wonderful company. The book has gotten rave reviews, deservedly. If you’re waiting in vain for the next Patrick Rothfuss, console yourself with this, which looks like having a sequel.
One would scarcely expect a novel about the life of the staid Thomas Mann to be a page-turner. But in Colm Toibin's wizardly hands, The Magician achieves it. Toibin's prose is a paradoxical mix of the sober and the propulsive, and its beauty and energy keep one involved for 400-plus pages--from Thomas's childhood, thorugh his marriage and the beginning of his reputation as a writer, through the wars, his exile in America, and his final return to Europe. We're shown the genesis of each of Mann's works in particular real-life situations. Mann is portrayed in all his contradictions: dreamy but resolute: outwardly inexpressive and formal but possessed of an intense but wary inner life; a father of six who never stopped being deeply attracted to men. Toibin's account of Mann's privileged exile in the US during WWII, while most of the rest of his family was struggling, is deeply moving. This is a book to match Toibin's earlier triumph, The Master.
What Are You Going Through
Simone Weil, who lends this book its title, believed in the importance--the duty, in fact-- of paying attention to others. Sigrid Nunez borrows more than her title from Weil--she herself adopts an attentive stance. She does this on two levels: first, as a writer, paying attention to experiences large and small, and presenting them in a way that brings out the weirdness at the edges of what we encounter; and secondly, she shows how attention feels, as we inhabit the mind of her narrator, is attentive to both what others are going through, and to the impact it has on herself. Threaded throughout the book is the narrative of her concern for a terminally ill friend, and the book ends with a luminous chronicle of the last weeks of a dying friend, the narrator living alongside her. The story refuses despair and depression. Instead it foregrounds the grace, humor, and courage of the stricken woman in the face of the inevitable, and the narrator's tenacious, thoughtful compassion. Altogether, an exceptionally moving novel.
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All of these stories are in fact written in the first person singular, which, along with their conversational tone, gives each of these stories an atmosphere of intimacy, as if you're sitting over a drink with a friend. These stories have ordinary elements, yes, but this is Murakami we're dealing with, and nothing can be quite taken for granted in any situation he creates. You begin on one path and find yourself, without quite realizing it, on another. Along with the lingering mysteriousness, there's often a pervading wistfulness, a signature Murakami mix.
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A woman --identified only as M.--invites an artist she's long admired to rent a cabin on her property--the "second place" of the title. Let's just say that the artist--identified only as L. --isn't a self-effacing, polite guest. The effect of this new person--and eventually his girlfriend--on the lives of M. and her family forms the substance of this novel. It's study in the havoc others can wreak in one's life. Read it for the intelligence of the narrator (but what narrator in a Rachel Cusk novel is not intelligent?), the subtlety of the insights into herself, combined with areas of blindness which emerge over the course of the novel. A book one wants to begin again after finishing.
Several families are vacationing in a house together. The adults drink, complain, talk about shopping or the stock market. To their children, ranging in age from pre-school to late adolescence, they are hopeless and deplorable, to the point where the childen don't want each other to know which of the adults are actually their parents. An age-old story, you may think, until conditions change dramatically and it becomes increasingly clear who are the adults and who are the children.
Majella lives with her alcoholic mother and works the late shift in fast-food shop in a small town in Ireland. Her life is full of obligation and repetition; she has no friends and little ambition, despite her sharp mind. (She is also on the spectrum, as we glean from small details here and there.) Then the unexpected happens, and the reader, who's been rooting for her all along, lets out a resounding cheer.
Patti Smith responds, in this latest book, to the passage of time, to matters of aging and impending loss. Friends and collaborators she has known for decades are unwell. Memory looms large. And the dread 2016 election is on the horizon. To convey the complexity of her response to what is emerging in her life, the prose is at times more dreamlike and surreal than in her earlier books, but she is still the creative survivor she always has been. The result is memorable and cleansing.