The latest installment in Ginzburg’s oeuvre might be her finest yet. valentino and sagittarius
A TIME FOR MERCY
holding out for a man like Heathcliff or Mr. Darcy, whose scorn masks a deep pain only she can heal. She wants a kiss that will stop the earth from spinning, with a man who would die for her. If they were stranded in the ocean with only one plank of driftwood between them, he would insist she take it, and comfort her as he froze to death. No eighth-grader can compete with that. Nathan Bagley never stood a chance.” In fact, it turns out he does, because reality has a way of winning. In “The Tenant,” a woman who is living happily with a hungry bear—she serves him dinner by candlelight—is heartbroken when he moves out. While “Foresight” imagines a substance that lets you see all your possible futures, it seems to concur with “Stone Fruit” about the disappointment at the end of the road: “Alice had wanted to sleep beneath the stars nestled in a gypsy’s arms. She’d wanted to travel the world and write a novel rivaling War and Peace. Now, she wants a house to grow old in.” The drifty way the stories unfold—a lack of narrative urgency—may keep some readers from digging in. Whimsy and fantasy meet the way things really turn out in stories from a strong new voice.
Grisham, John Doubleday (480 pp.) $20.96 | Oct. 13, 2020 978-0-385-54596-9
A small-town Mississippi courtroom becomes the setting for a trademark Grisham legal tussle. Stuart Kofer is not a nice guy. He drinks way too much and likes to brawl. One night, coming home in a foul mood with a blood alcohol count more than triple the legal limit, he breaks his live-in girlfriend’s jaw. He’s done terrible things to her children, too—and now her 16-year-old boy, Drew, puts an end to the terror. Unfortunately for the kid in a place where uniforms are worshipped, Stu was a well-liked cop. “Did it really matter if he was sixteen or sixty? It certainly didn’t matter to Stu Kofer, whose stock seemed to rise by the hour,” writes Grisham of local opinion about giving Drew the benefit of the doubt.
y o u n g a d u lt
VALENTINO AND SAGITTARIUS
Ginzburg, Natalia Trans. by Bardoni, Avril New York Review Books (144 pp.) $15.95 paper | Sep. 15, 2020 978-1-68137-474-1 A pair of novellas describe mid-20thcentury Italian life. The latest installment in Ginzburg’s oeuvre might be her finest yet. The two novellas that make up this volume are meticulously observed accounts of midcentury Italian family life. In the first, a family scrimps and saves so that their only son can receive an education; his parents hope that he will become “a man of consequence.” Instead, Valentino marries a wealthy, unattractive woman 10 years his senior. Despairing, his mother tells him, “not one of us has ever done anything just for money.” In the next story, a dissatisfied mother of two dreams of opening an art gallery. She isn’t an easy character to like: Her dream reeks of self-delusion. More than anything, her interest in art stems from an all-consuming pretension to culture and cultivation. But Ginzburg writes with such a sense of empathy for each of her characters, and her prose is so utterly lacking in sentimentality, that it becomes nearly impossible not to sympathize with every one of the figures peopling these stories. Each novella is narrated by a young woman, the first by Valentino’s sister, the second by one of the daughters of the unnamed mother. Each novella, too, features Ginzburg’s characteristic psychological insight, her subtle, sometimes-bleak wit, and her fastidious—but never fussy—prose, here capably translated by Bardoni. This renewed interest in Ginzburg’s body of work comes as a tremendous gift. She was a magnificent writer. Ginzburg described with a nearly deceptive lucidity the delusions, trials, and dreams of her characters. |
kirkus.com
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fiction
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1 october 2020
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