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We Need To Talk About Kevin Paperback – Import, 9 May 2006
Purchase options and add-ons
- ISBN-101852424672
- ISBN-13978-1852424671
- EditionMain
- PublisherSerpent's Tail
- Publication date9 May 2006
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions12.9 x 2.8 x 19.8 cm
- Print length500 pages
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Product description
Review
This superb, many-layered novel intelligently weighs the culpability of parental nurture against the nightmarish possibilities of an innately evil child ― Daily Telegraph Published On: 2006-05-06
Urgent, unblinking and articulate fiction ― Sunday Times Published On: 2006-05-07
Cleverly balances the grand guignol and the mundane ― Guardian Published On: 2006-05-06
Shriver keeps up an almost unbearable suspense It's hard to imagine a more striking demolition job on the American myth of the perfect suburban family ― The Sunday Telegraph Published On: 2006-05-21
A study of despair, a book of ideas and a deconstruction of modern American morality -- David Baddiel ― The Times
One of my favourite novels... the best thing I've read in years -- Jeremy Vine ― London Magazine
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Leadtext: Dear Franklin,
I'm unsure why one trifling incident this afternoon has moved me to write to you.
But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards. Were you still installed in my kitchen, slathering crunchy peanut butter on Branola though it was almost time for dinner, I'd no sooner have put down the bags, one leaking a clear viscous drool, than this little story would come tumbling out, even before I chided that we're having pasta tonight so would you please not eat that whole sandwich.
In the early days, of course, my tales were exotic imports, from Lisbon, from Kathmandu. But no one wants to hear stories from abroad, really, and I could detect from your telltale politeness that you privately preferred anecdotal trinkets from closer to home: an eccentric encounter with a toll collector on the George Washington Bridge, say. Marvels from the mundane helped to ratify your view that all my foreign travel was a kind of cheating. My souvenirs -- a packet of slightly stale Belgian waffles, the British expression for "piffle" (codswallop!) -- were artificially imbued with magic by mere dint of distance. Like those baubles the Japanese exchange -- in a box in a bag, in a box in a bag -- the sheen on my offerings from far afield was all packaging. What a more considerable achievement, to root around in the untransubstantiated rubbish of plain old New York state and scrounge a moment of piquancy from a trip to the Nyack Grand Union.
Which is just where my story takes place. I seem finally to be learning what you were always trying to teach me, that my own country is as exotic and even as perilous as Algeria. I was in the dairy aisle and didn't need much; I wouldn't. I never eat pasta these days, without you to dispatch most of the bowl. I do miss your gusto.
It's still difficult for me to venture into public. You would think, in a country that so famously has "no sense of history," as Europeans claim, that I might cash in on America's famous amnesia. No such luck. No one in this "community" shows any signs of forgetting, after a year and eight months -- to the day. So I have to steel myself when provisions run low. Oh, for the clerks at the 7-Eleven on Hopewell Street my novelty has worn off, and I can pick up a quart of milk without glares. But our regular Grand Union remains a gauntlet.
I always feel furtive there. To compensate, I force my back straight, my shoulders square. I see now what they mean by "holding your head high," and I am sometimes surprised by how much interior transformation a ramrod posture can afford. When I stand physically proud, I feel a small measure less mortified.
Debating medium eggs or large, I glanced toward the yogurts. A few feet away, a fellow shopper's frazzled black hair went white at the roots for a good inch, while its curl held only at the ends: an old permanent grown out. Her lavender top and matching skirt may have once been stylish, but now the blouse bound under the arms and the peplum served to emphasize heavy hips. The outfit needed pressing, and the padded shoulders bore the faint stripe of fading from a wire hanger. Something from the nether regions of the closet, I concluded, what you reach for when everything else is filthy or on the floor. As the woman's head tilted toward the processed cheese, I caught the crease of a double chin.
Don't try to guess; you'd never recognize her from that portrait. She was once so neurotically svelte, sharply cornered, and glossy as if commercially gift wrapped. Though it may be more romantic to picture the bereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolates as with tap water. Besides, there are women who keep themselves sleek and smartly turned out less to please a spouse than to keep up with a daughter, and, thanks to us, she lacks that incentive these days.
It was Mary Woolford. I'm not proud of this, but I couldn't face her. I reeled. My hands went clammy as I fumbled with the carton, checking that the eggs were whole. I rearranged my features into those of a shopper who had just remembered something in the next aisle over and managed to place the eggs on the child-seat without turning. Scuttling off on this pretense of mission, I left the cart behind, because the wheels squeaked. I caught my breath in soup.
I should have been prepared, and often am -- girded, guarded, often to no purpose as it turns out. But I can't clank out the door in full armor to run every silly errand, and besides, how can Mary harm me now? She has tried her damnedest; she's taken me to court. Still, I could not tame my heartbeat, nor return to dairy right away, even once I realized that I'd left that embroidered bag from Egypt, with my wallet, in the cart.
Which is the only reason I didn't abandon the Grand Union altogether. I eventually had to skulk back to my bag, and so I meditated on Campbell's asparagus and cheese, thinking aimlessly how Warhol would be appalled by the redesign.
By the time I crept back the coast was clear, and I swept up my cart, abruptly the busy professional woman who must make quick work of domestic chores. A familiar role, you would think. Yet it's been so long since I thought of myself that way that I felt sure the folks ahead of me at checkout must have pegged my impatience not as the imperiousness of the secondearner for whom time is money, but as the moist, urgent panic of a fugitive.
Product details
- Publisher : Serpent's Tail; Main edition (9 May 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 500 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1852424672
- ISBN-13 : 978-1852424671
- Dimensions : 12.9 x 2.8 x 19.8 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 612,526 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 57,503 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- 63,334 in Contemporary Fiction (Books)
- Customer reviews:
About the author
Lionel Shriver is a novelist whose previous books include Orange Prize–winner We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Post-Birthday World, A Perfectly Good Family, Game Control, Double Fault, The Female of the Species, Checker and the Derailleurs, and Ordinary Decent Criminals.
She is widely published as a journalist, writing features, columns, op-eds, and book reviews for the Guardian, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Economist, Marie Claire, and many other publications.
She is frequently interviewed on television, radio, and in print media. She lives in London and Brooklyn, NY.
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Once past the first fifth of the book, the story picks up in both pace and drama. The depiction of the characters is startlingly realistic; the conflict compelling.
Lionel Shriver was faced with a huge problem with a novel of such controversial subject matter: how to avoid it being seen as a portrayal of an 'everyman' high-school killer. The text itself repeatedly comes back to the question of why young men go on murderous rampages in American schools, and Shriver must have known that if the novel was seen as an attempt to provide the magic answer, he would fail. So he avoids the 'everyman' issue brilliantly by having a (potentially... arguably) unreliable narrator, speaking to us in the first person. Instead of an author's polemic on the social pressures of high school, or genetic causes of sociopathy, or the nature of evil, yadda, yadda, we have the complex ramblings, arguments, accusations and self-flagellations of the mother of a killer. Is she telling the truth (as she sees it)? And even if she is, is she right? Even when Kevin himself talks about his behaviour, his first person narrative comes to us second-hand, told third person by Eva, nestled in her own first person narrative - fittingly gothic styling for such dark subject matter.
The reader is forced to confront disturbing questions of cause and effect, and the direction of this, versus cause-correlation confusion, and the question of nature versus nurture. As the tension rises, the reader is gripped by the deepening complexity of these questions, and absence of of any definitive answers to them.
The personality of Eva is very memorable; her epigrammatic delivery and stoic miserableness captivating. It's great fun (if fun is the correct term for this type of novel) to pick out the one-liners that encapsulate one aspect of the debate. Perhaps, though, every now and again, some of the one-liners seem a little too well rehearsed, and distract just a little.
Minor criticisms aside, 'We Need To Talk About Kevin' is a brilliant novel that I fully recommend.
[...]
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver explores this very idea through a source closer to the subject than any other--the mother of a boy who shot seven of his classmates during a rampage in the school gym. Although the book is fictional, the subject matter is all too real, and this makes it an exceptionally chilling read.
Eva Khatchadourian explores her feeling about her son Kevin's actions through a series of letters to her estranged husband, Franklin. Although this might seem like a limiting way to go about a book of this scope, it actually works quite well. Through Eva's eyes, we watch the excruciating formative years of an evil child who convinces his gullible father that he's a sweet boy, but whose mother knows better. Eva's dislike of her cold little boy just fuels his cruel streak, slowly escalating his violent nature as he grows older.
The heartbreaking part of the novel comes when Eva and Franklin have a second child, the incredibly naïve and trusting Celia, who thinks her brother is the greatest person on earth. The foreshadowing of what happens to Celia, and to the entire family, is almost unbearable to read because Shriver does such an excellent job of painting a picture of a family whose members are far from perfect but who certainly don't deserve what will happen to them. An air of bleak despair settles over the entire novel, reflecting Eva's mood as she writes to her beloved Franklin.
This is not light, it will not give you faith in humanity and it will probably scare you more than any horror novel you've ever read. It also took a while to get into. However, it was eventually worth it. Why? Because what happened to Eva's family could easily happen to any family in America. With her eye for detail and talent for creating a chilling, desperate atmosphere, Lionel Shriver has penned a novel that will stay with you long after you've read the last chapter.
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Reviewed in India on 4 October 2023