Thomas E. Kennedy – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.24 FALLING SIDEWAYS by Thomas E. Kennedy /2011/falling-sideways-by-thomas-e-kennedy/ Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:28:25 +0000 /?p=16483 Book Quote:

“Gilgamesh, whither rovest thou? The life you seek you shall not find.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (MAR 01, 2011)

In his fantastic and insightful book, On Writing, the prolific writer Stephen King once said: “People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do.”

But what if that work is especially mind-numbing and unfulfilling and involves plodding away at an outfit called the Tank—chatting, shuffling papers, composing reports, sending e-mails and wondering where things went wrong? Would that still make for a readable story? As Thomas Kennedy’s new book, Falling Sideways shows, the answer is yes.

It’s probably because most readers will be able to relate to the book’s central protagonist, Fred Breathwaite. Breathwaite is an American expat living in Denmark, his adopted country, and works as an international liaison at the Tank—he is its “eyes in the greater world outside of Denmark” which means he is also responsible for bringing in international clients and accounts. Breathwaite has no great fascination for his job—as the book opens, he is dreading the Wednesday morning meeting at the “Mumble Club” a weekly meeting of department heads—but knows that the job affords him material comforts and a comfortable life he otherwise would not have had.

Breathwaite has older children comfortably settled and leading their own lives but it his youngest, Jes, who “gave him cause for concern and hope.” The teenaged Jes is convinced he does not want his life to turn out like his Dad’s. It seemed to Jes that “almost nobody in Denmark actually did anything anymore; they all just sat in offices sending e-mails to one another or went to meetings where they sat around a table and talked about the e-mails…Meanwhile, there were a million truly important things that needed doing in the world, things that were a matter of life and death for people who lived in poverty and misery. Jes wanted a foot into that door. And meanwhile, he wanted to do something concrete,” Kennedy writes. This “something concrete” is work at a key shop owned by an Afghani immigrant—Jes works here with his hands duplicating keys and reading Rilke is his spare time.

The elder Breathwaite can’t stand to see his son throw away his life. “The boy had all the right ideas and not a chance of realizing them,” he thinks. It is this conflict between father and son that forms one of the two central theses in the novel.

The other of course, is Breathwaite’s own job. Early in the book, he finds out he is being laid off and replaced by a younger executive Harald Jaeger, a skirt-chasing insecure worker with personal problems of his own. Breathwaite uses this career turn to question what the net sum of his life has really amounted to.

Falling Sideways is populated by a whole host of other characters including Martin Kampman, CEO of the Tank, and professional downsizer; Martin’s son, Adam, who also rebels against his father; and Birgitte Somers, the company’s CFO.

Falling Sideways is the second book in Kennedy’s “Copenhagen Quartet” to be released in the United States. The city comes alive in these pages and Kennedy does a fantastic job of portraying the city in the beautiful season of fall. The problem with Falling Sideways is that it does not meet the high expectations set by the first book in the quartet, In the Company of Angels. Compared to that earlier work, this one seems much more ordinary, its conclusion and narrative path foretold well before the end. In addition, quite a few of the characters seem clichéd and flat—probably because Kennedy never gets a chance to realize them fully. Nevertheless if the point of the quartet is to show Kennedy’s “range,” this book does that task well.

Together, the Copenhagen quartet is meant to encompass the four enduring seasons and if the first two books are any indication, the quartet is on its way to achieve this objective very effectively. In The Company of Angels embodies the spirit of spring. It is possible, after all, to view that book as a ray of hope despite horrific events in the characters’ past. In Falling Sideways, it is the melancholic allure of fall that beautifully permeates the novel. The season of decay and slow death is a perfect metaphor for the downward spiral many of the characters face. And just like the season, there are brief and spectacular splashes of color before it all ends.

It is fitting that Gilgamesh makes a brief appearance in the book. The moral of the story, if there is any, is that one could do no worse than to follow the timeless advice given to Gilgamesh:

Make thou merry by day and by night.
Of each day make thou a feast or rejoicing,
Pay heed to the little one that holds thy hand,
Let thy spouse delight in thy bosom,
For this is the task of mankind.

But as many of the characters in Falling Sideways realize, sometimes the best advice is the hardest to follow.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 1 readers
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury USA (March 1, 2011)
REVIEWER: Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Thomas E. Kennedy
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

In The Company of Angels

And another book all about office work:

And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Bibliography:

The Copenhagen Quartet:

  • Bluett’s Blue Hours (2002)
  • Danish Fall (2003) To be published as Falling Sideways (March 2011 US and UK)
  • Greene’s Summer (2004) Published as In the Company of Angels (March 2010 US and UK)
  • Kerrigan’s Copenhagen: A Love Story (2005)

Nonfiction:

  • Andre Dubus: A Study of the Short Fiction (1988)
  • The American Short Story Today (1991) (with Henrik Specht)
  • Robert Coover: A Study of the Short Fiction (1992)
  • Index to American Short Story Award Collections (1993)
  • Realism & Other Illusions: Essays on the Craft of Fiction (2002)
  • The Literary Traveler (2005) (with Walter Cummins)
  • Riding the Dog: A Look Back at America (2008)
]]> IN THE COMPANY OF ANGELS by Thomas E. Kennedy /2010/in-the-company-of-angels-by-thomas-e-kennedy/ Mon, 21 Jun 2010 21:02:31 +0000 /?p=10241 Book Quote:

“How much of a survivor, in fact, survives? How much must remain of a survivor for him also to be called a man? Some of us who are still present and accounted for perhaps are desaparecido nonetheless, invisible pieces missing from the whole.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (JUN 21, 2010)

In The Company of Angels is an important book, elegantly written, that shattered my heart into little pieces and then offered me the power of redemption. It is one of those rare books that is transformative.

At its center is Bernardo Greene, a Chilean teacher who undergoes physical and psychological torture by Pinochet’s thugs, and is now at the Copenhagen Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims. He connects with another damaged individual, Michela, who has also battled evil in the form of her abusive ex-husband Mads who “beat her maybe a dozen times, twenty times, perhaps twice a year for sixteen years.”

Bernardo (“Nardo”) is a poet at heart, and taught his students the poetry of Domingo Gomez Rojas back in Chile before he was picked up. He reflects: “Their objective was to break his spirit, only because he had been a man the people of his community respected, a teacher. They looked up to him, trusted him, a man not without dignity or the courage to examine his thoughts, his experiences, and to tell of what he believed to be so. Not a hero, but a man nonetheless, still a man.” Nardo was tortured in every possible way, destroying his body and filling his soul with shame.

While in prison, at his most despairing, he experiences “a moment’s escape into sunlight from a dark, filthy cell in the company of angels who promise him that one day he would be free.” The promised freedom refers to the shackles of his mind, not just his body. Later he muses: “The poets were captured, but not their songs. For a song, once it is let loose in the air, can only be captured by one person at a time and cannot be stopped…If only one person hears it and learns it, others will, too, and others again. And they will teach the songs to others.”

Michela, for Nardi, is a living angel; someone who will teach him that there can still be good in the world. Michala has her own demons: she visits a bleak nursing home where her adulterous father is wasting from cancer and her mother is unsuccessfully fighting dementia, and her memories drift to the suicide of her 17-year-old daughter. Kennedy writes: “We are alone in the envelope of our bodies — but there are things that diminish our soltitude, that make it possible to speak across the chasm between us, to reach across and touch it, if only for an instant…”

Thomas Kennedy could have turned this entire book into a despondent and dark tale, but instead, he envelopes it into a sort of fable-like quality. The theme is no less than the survival of the human spirit, and the defeat of evil by an indefatigable wish to love. This is one of the novels within Kennedy’s  The Copenhagen Quartet; each is written in a different style and the series can be read in any order. The quartet was originally published by a small press in Ireland and then translated to Danish by Kennedy himself. Finally, it is being published here in the US and the UK. I will eagerly read each as they are published. In the Company of Angels receives my highest recommendation.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 32 readers
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury USA; 1 edition (March 16, 2010)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Thomas E. Kennedy
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

The Copenhagen Quartet:

Nonfiction:

  • Andre Dubus: A Study of the Short Fiction (1988)
  • The American Short Story Today (1991) (with Henrik Specht)
  • Robert Coover: A Study of the Short Fiction (1992)
  • Index to American Short Story Award Collections (1993)
  • Realism & Other Illusions: Essays on the Craft of Fiction (2002)
  • The Literary Traveler (2005) (with Walter Cummins)
  • Riding the Dog: A Look Back at America (2008)
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