A remarkable education in the grief of staying alive.
Hewn out of the brutality of Watership Down and the trenchant ironies of Animal Farm, this is an animal story for adults.
A fable that makes Aesop’s darkest seem saccharine, Italian author Zannoni’s debut novel concerns Archy, a beech marten (a weasel-like animal) inhabiting a stretch of forest with his small family. With a dead father, a harsh, unfeeling mother, and siblings barely able to make their way through the brush, young Archy can only envision a Hobbesian future for himself: nasty, brutish, and short. When his mother sells him as a slave to the mysterious Solomon, a fox who has set himself up as the woodland’s only trader-lender (with the help of his bodyguard/enforcer, a dog called Joel), Archy finds himself receiving many beatings for his clumsy mistakes as well as an odd, intriguing education at Solomon’s hands. Gradually, the marten meets other denizens of the forest and discovers life to be nothing less than drenched in the red of tooth and claw. Growing into a stumbling adulthood, Archy wills himself to learn at Solomon’s feet, to open himself up to the fox’s abusive instruction, which stems from a strange human book, the Bible, which the old trader found years earlier while feeding on the body of a hanged man. In time, Archy yearns to live on a higher, less degraded plane and turns to his painfully acquired writing talents to make sense of the carnage around him. The character of Archy, in all his awkward, vulnerable marten-ness, emerges as courageously as any classical hero. Finding happiness in the arms of a beloved only to have her ripped away, finding stability in the trading post after the death of his master only to be driven from it by interlopers, he is a noble, tormented protagonist striving amid a beastly contingent of the selfish, stupid, and evil. This darkly beguiling novel casts its enchantments with an eye trained on the human heart, with its false chambers and rough, bestial inclinations.
A remarkable education in the grief of staying alive.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781681377285
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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