| Title | : | Kind One |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1566893119 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781566893114 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 211 |
| Publication | : | First published September 13, 2012 |
| Awards | : | PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (2013) |
Haunting, chilling, and suspenseful, Kind One is a powerful tale of redemption and human endurance in antebellum America.
Kind One Reviews
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Tras leer la sinopsis de la novela, alguien podría preguntarse ¿otra novela sobre el racismo, otro libro sobre la barbarie de unos hombres contra otros (aunque en este caso tenga novedad de que sean mujeres contra mujeres, hombres contra mujeres, mujeres contra hombres), más vueltas a cargo de la América profunda…? Uf, qué pereza, ¿no?
Si es así, ustedes se lo pierden, pero que sepan que aquí encontrarían historias que “se te hincan en un pie como un clavo”, que les perturbarán con su tono de una frialdad de loco o de alguien que ha pasado muerta la mayor parte de su vida.
No creo que pueda dejar a nadie indiferente y me apuesto lo que sea con quien quiera a que no es capaz de leer el libro sin cerrar los ojos en más de una ocasión. -
Una granja de cerdos en la América profunda antes de la guerra civil es el escenario de la crueldad y el terror que, en realidad, son los protagonistas de esta novela.
Con ecos de William Faulkner y Cormac McCarthy, el autor desgrana unas historias terribles con una impasibilidad que nos hace pensar si no es ésa la auténtica condición humana, aquello que en realidad constituye nuestra historia ancestral. Muy perturbador.
Ginny, con 14 años, es entregada por su padre al criador de cerdos Linus Lancaster, en calidad de esposa. En la granja conoce a las esclavas Cleome y Zinia, con las que entabla una extraña relación.
No es una narración convencional de buenos y malos, aquí la violencia se extiende en círculos concéntricos que van atrapando a todos los actores de la trama. ¿Qué diferencia hay entre las víctimas y los verdugos? Ésta parece ser la pregunta clave de la historia.
El estilo es críptico, sugiere más que describe, y el lector tiene que completar los huecos en la narración, que a veces se hace difícil de seguir.
En suma, una obra diferente, que conmueve y hace reflexionar. Feel-gooders abstenerse! -
Here is a relentlessly disturbing tale, told in a unique and arresting voice. There is so much beauty in the prose. There are such gentle observations made about nature, and about the possibility of human kindness, between acts of horrific violence--I would write "unimaginable violence" only Laird Hunt imagined them. Twelve hours after reaching the end I'm still very upset by what I've read. It's a magnificently imagined horror story that reaches for something deeper in its tellings and succeeds.
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Esta historia no sé lo que tiene pero me ha enganchado y gustado mucho.
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I don't know what this story has but it hooked me and I liked it a lot. -
Hunt's low-key prose is, as usual, a pleasure. The multiple narrators give mostly quiet, matter-of-fact accounts of their dark story. An occasional detail, almost casually dropped, adds insight to the horrific context of slavery, incest and abuse, as we struggle to process the harrowing events.
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Laird Hunt has shown a fondness for fictional experiment & he has something of an expat’s background — lots of time abroad & fluency in French — but for his breakthrough as a novelist he’s come to rock-ribbed Americana. Indeed, he’s gone back in time, reimagining the Civil War as a deeply dysfunctional, mixed-race Border State household. That War & its core challenge, to recreate the nation without slavery, looms over the masterful KIND ONE, yet you’ll find no armies, no battlefield. Battles here take place in the bedroom, the kitchen, & especially in head & heart. Sentences go for marvelous off-kilter physicality, distracting us with details that wink or smear, distracting in the best sense, until out of some unexpected corner we get, say, the “gristle” of a knife plunging into flesh & bone. I dare any reader to take a careless drink of water after reading the prologue, the story of an accident at a well. Following that trauma, the primary narrator Ginny comes first as welcome relief; a teenager through much of the drama, her opening reminiscences glimmer w/ wit & joy. But then there’s Ginny’s Svengali, her seducer & husband Linus Lancaster. The catalysts of the novel’s mounting shocks, though, may be the slave girls Cleome & Zinnia, working Lancaster’s false “paradise” of a pig farm. On this Kentucky farm the developing tensions have a terrible familiarity. We know all too well Ginny’s breakdown, rooted in disappointment & intimidation, & recognize too how she festers to the point of taking out her pain on those less powerful: on the slaves. Cleome & Zinnia work as personalities, too, though; they’re not mere punching bags. The later, most intense turns of the plot hinge on whether either of these girls — former slaves all of a sudden, & by means of a mystery that hangs over most of the rest of the book — whether either will prove the “kind one.” As for Linus, by comparison, he can come off as oversimple, either browbeating someone or, with whip in hand, delivering the actual thing. The master has his troubles, though, his failures; we can whiff the same curdled hopes in him as in Ginny. Besides, what’s wrong with a larger-than-life villain? What’s wrong with an unforgettable scene of whipping an innocent young man to death? The victim in that case is farm’s lone male slave, a soft-smiling type whose perverse turns on Uncle Remus stories offer respite to the women & the reader alike. So too, this stunning reinvention of the historical novel can work like a balm on all the suffering it shows. One of the final narrators is a black freedman named Prosper, & after the war he comes back down to what used to be Dixie & so achieves a moving connection across the lost & the dead, maybe enough to begin the repairs on this house torn asunder.
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I think this went over my head. I was intrigued with the beginning, but then it shifted gears and I grew more confused as the story got more muddled. I couldn't see what the beginning and end had to do with the middle story, which was a tale of... a woman in an abusive relationship and some slaves? Oddly it wasn't *about* slavery, even though it turned out that was the setting. Overall it left me feeling meh.
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This novel takes you to a dark place and (almost) leaves you there. Told primarily from the perspective of Ginny, a fourteen-year-old girl who marries the abusive, slave owning Linus Lancaster, Kind One examines rape, torture, complicity, and redemption on a pre-Civil War Kentucky farm insidiously named “Paradise.” Linus Lancaster is the archetypal slave-owning monster: tall, muscular, hard-drinking, and complete master of his pig-farming domain. His particular brand of sadism mirrors the slaughtering of the pigs he keeps: “Linus Lancaster liked us all to take a turn at the killing…those of us who ate the most ought to kill the most [he said]. That was me and Linus Lancaster.” For six years Linus has his way with Ginny until he becomes bored of her and begins “visiting” nightly his two teenage slaves, Cleome and Zinnia (who may also be his daughters, Hunt isn’t entirely clear on this). Driven by jealousy or disgust or both, the battered Ginny begins assaulting the girls she once treated like daughters; here Hunt is clear: abuse begets abuse. But when Linus is murdered (no spoilers), the girls turn on Ginny with vindictive sadism, leading to Hunt’s other motif: savagery begets savagery.
Hunt interweaves the brutal narrative with Ginny as an old woman, hinting that forgiveness—despite all the horrible things she’s done and endured—isn’t out of reach. And he tells the story’s (thankfully) redemptive end through the eyes of those around Ginny during and after those awful years, a captivating technique that alleviates pressure and stimulates curiosity. Though stunningly written, I won’t be book talking this to my middle schoolers; objectively speaking, however, Hunt has crafted a haunting look at a demented set of circumstances that took place on many a farm in the Civil War era. -
Gorgeous. Gritty. Spare prose.
Gin is married to Linus Lancaster, her mother's second cousin and a much older man, when she's still just a teenager. He promised her parents he lived in a mansion with white columns, a planter's house in Kentucky. Instead, his house was ratty and dismal. That's not all he lied about. He said he would take care of Gin, give her everything she needs, that he would care for and love her. In reality he's a brute, a bastard who rapes, beats and takes what he wants.
Gin is imprisoned: first metaphorically, then literally. Once she's released from her chains still she picks at the wound, keeping it open as a constant reminder of what hell feels like.
The story flashes between Gin's current life with her husband and later in her life, as an old woman, after she's run away to stay with another family in Indiana. There is no comfort for her, no solace, no redemption.
I could hardly put the book down. It's deceivingly quiet; so much goes on using language so languid you don't realize the horror 'til it's upon you. No wonder it was up for the PEN/Faulkner. -
Laird, even when he writes about Portugese longing and Dutch fish-men, is a powerfully American voice. This novel comes back to that, in an antebellum tale that will remind some of Morrison's Beloved. The book is great, beautifully written, but its greatest successes lie in temptations avoided. It is a story of morality left to run feral, but Hunt doesn't give his characters the space to moralize. It's a story of brutalities, but Hunt doesn't fetishize them. It's a book with five distinct narrators, all more or less southern, born in the nineteenth century, but their voices remain distinct. The book dabbles in the impossible, in a bit of hallucination, but, in a departure for Hunt, not much can be explained away, and neither can it be written off as magical realism.
I'm a fan of Laird Hunt's work, but the book still caught me by surprise, kept me up at night, and now I'm eager to hear what others think. -
To read this book is to be haunted by both ghosts and the living alike. This is a book about human nature, both good and bad. It is a piece of historical fiction just as much as it is a book of myth, of tall tales, of harsh realities, of heartache, of trying to live, to get by. The text is scarred and the characters keep reaching down to scratch at the places where once they were shackled (even if the shackles were only metaphorical), they all ware trying to re-remember as Toni Morrison would say, and by re-remembering, they all are hoping to find a way to escape the past. And because of this, because it mirrors a still racially tense country, Laird Hunt's Kind One joins the rank of the great American novel.
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There's a lot to admire in Laird Hunt's antebellum tale set in rural Kentucky. Hunt has brought a range of voices to his tale of violence, revenge and redemption, using innovative, spare, gritty prose.
It was the writing style, the voices mostly of characters Ginny and Zinnia, that I both admired and felt disconcerted by. I found that I had to read many sentences more than once for complete comprehension, because they seemed to be missing appropriate conjunctions.
Kind One is primarily the story of Ginny, a young girl who married slave owner Linus Lancaster, and moved to his Kentucky pig farm, which he (ironically) called Paradise. Linus oversold the status of Paradise, which was anything but.
Linus was a boorish, brutal man, who had his way at will with the teenage Ginny, without consideration or apology. When he became bored with his young wife, he turned his attentions to his even younger female slaves, sisters Cleome and Zinnia.
At this rejection, Ginny, who had until that time acted as a mother and protector of the young slave girls, turned on them and meted out similarly brutality and humiliation as she had been subjected to by her husband. The abused became the abuser.
As death befell Linus, Zinnia and Cleome decided to turn on Ginny, to take their revenge for her brutal behaviour. That was a revenge that was carefully considered and executed, in line with the old maxim that revenge is a dish best served cold.
Ginny understood what was in store for her and why.
Ginny eventually escaped the Kentucky pig farm, and came to the home of Lucious Wilson, who cared for her and came to love the woman who became known locally as Scary Sue.
The storytelling voice changes in the latter stages from Ginny to that of Zinnia, who picks up the narrative to tell of what became of her and sister Cleome, who was pregnant to Lancaster when they left the farm.
Lucious Wilson has the final word, ending a novel of brutality, discrimination and inhumanity with at least a glimmer of warmth, softness and love, as he and Ginny /Sue, now a more contented old woman, are involved in acts of redemption.
This novel was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award in 2013, recognised for its innovative treatment of a subject that has been written about countless times. This is a human story, sparingly and evocatively told, that I found to be both rewarding and testing in equal measure. My star rating was on the borderline between 3 and 4. -
Kind One was one of five nominees for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award but it won't get the number of readers it deserves. It's a small novel like Train Dreams, Tinkers, and Lord of Misrule, and like those first two it covers entire lifetimes with haunting language. But the subject matter of Kind One is particularly horrific, and there are no easy answers, and it's sad, sad - but hard; not sentimental. I realize I haven't said anything specific about the story or the writing - but I'm still thinking about it all. ("It follows you out the door to your work or your rest then jumps into your head and runs around inside it like a spider.”)
Interesting interview with the author at Bookforum:
http://www.bookforum.com/interview/10874 -
I loved this book right from the start...but then it just kinda rolled into some sort of sludge I could not understand...I honestly did not get the whole slavery thing until the very end...I can not give it four stars simply because it was a book about slavery...especially since I had no clue...and the ending????? I did enjoy the writing...the way it was written but I had difficulty seeing thru the sludge at times and had to go back and re-read...funny how even after re-reading I still did not see the whole slave thing...just thought the guy was abusive
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The prose was beautiful at times, which is hard to admit given the violent plot, but there is something about the book that left me thinking, "WTF?" As others have commented in their reviews, there were times that I just couldn’t grasp the story. Given the subject matter, I can appreciate the vague descriptions, but the book left something to be desired.
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Un libro raro. A mí, personalmente, no me ha gustado. No he conseguido entender quiénes eran los del principio, los que excavaban el pozo. Por otro lado, la brutalidad en las relaciones entre Linus, Gin, Zinnia y Cleome me parecía abrumadora. Sé que eran otros tiempos, pero no, la historia no me ha gustado nada.
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http://www.examiner.com/review/book-r... -
An evocative and distressing tale of slavery and the way violence begets violence.
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me ha parecido un pelín pesado y el argumento no ha ido por dónde me esperaba,aún así,ha estado bien.
curioso -
Last year I read
Zorrie by the author of this book because it was nominated for the National Book Award. I loved that book and determined to read all the other books Laird Hunt, an author I had not heard of, had written. I've gathered most of those books and this will make my third book by Hunt. It is both very different and very similar to the other two. How can that be?
Similarities? Primarily it's the prose. This author knows how to write. The prose is mesmerizing. It put me right into the situation with the characters. I could feel how it. And he's superb with descriptions of place. And the character development is wonderful. Most of the characters are real and complex.
Differences? Structure and style differ. This one leans heavily towards horror, although possibly not for the period in which it was set, and there is significant cruelty, both physical and mental.
The majority of this book is set in pre-Civil War Kentucky. Young Ginny, 14 years old, has married her mother's second cousin Linus Lancaster and left Indiana to live with him in Kentucky. While Linus described his farm as having a mansion filled with expensive things, that is not what Ginny finds on arrival. But Ginny does find two young slave girls just about the same age as she is and they become friends. Lancaster becomes enamored with pigs and lets them run free, so the green grass disappears and everything becomes rather muddy or dusty. Then Lancaster grows bored with Ginny and begins sleeping with the slave girls and Ginny becomes a monster who abuses the two - Cleome and Zinnia - like Lancaster does. Lancaster's third slave is a young man. When a former associate of Lancaster's shows up when he is not there, Lancaster takes it out on the young man by whipping him and having Ginny whip him and the whipping continues for quite a long time. Lancaster dies about eight years after Ginny came with him to Kentucky. The slave girls take revenge but perhaps one of them is kind.
Ginny ends up working on a farm in Indiana. She's never untroubled but found a safe home. Lancaster's secrets are revealed. While Ginny, Zinnia, and Cleome suffered, hope appears in the next generation.
I've rounded my rating up to 5 stars from 4.5 stars. The half star is because why the first part of this novel had anything to do with the rest of it did not make sense, at least to me, until the very end.
There are much better reviews than mine. See those of John,
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... , and Lisa Guidarini,
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... -
“I’d seen the sister kick a slow goat in its teeth. I didn’t stay to have any of my own kicked out.”
It’s difficult to summarize this one. There’s a lot of meanness in “Kind One,” a story told through several voices in a zig-zag timeline from 1830 to 1911. In the pre-Civil War South, young Ginny marries Linus Lancaster, a man full of false promises and a hidden cruel streak; a violent abusive blowhard. He takes Ginny to his ramshackle Kentucky pig farm where she begins a friendly relationship with a couple of young slave girls, sisters named Cleome and Zinnia. There are some ugly secrets here, and the author has a wonderful way of revealing them. There is violence aplenty: whippings, torture, murder, rape, and slavery. It wouldn’t seem there is much room here for the kindness of a “kind one.” But Laird Hunt digs deep and examines the good and bad aspects of human nature traveling through the characters in Kind One. -
Something like...3.5 maybe. Very different writing technique, and unlike anything I've read. That however caused some confusion in understanding just what was going on. Dream sequences were odd, and a bit much, very fanciful and obscure.
I'd read Hunt's NEVERHOME, and really liked it. In this book, a young woman becomes the wife of her mother's second cousin, on a pig farm in Kentucky where she finds the promises of a big manor home far from reality and where the two servant girls eventually take her into captivity. But all of this is only eventually understood through varying and different accounts.
You might want to take a peek preview before you decide to read. I liked it. I didn't love it. -
Still confused about what happened there between the plot lines at the end. Felt like the writer was writing in pieces
The fourteen year old protagonist asks her father to marry her much older mother’s second cousin, believing him to be a rich man with farm wealth and a beautiful home. However reality soon clicks when she arrives at his property and it isn’t anything like he described.
The man he promised to be soon fades away as he becomes more and more abusive and soon his attention turns to his two maids who are even younger than his wife.
This book, set in the South in a time of slavery, is raw in its vivid descriptions but also lacks because the author has sometimes chosen to write as if this is a 1860s poetry book.
Still confused about the ending 🤔 -
This was riveting, with language that was breathtaking, really. There in lies a question, though. Ginny *was* the brightest student in her small school, the one most likely to continue to learn, but would she be capable of the dread-soaked lyricism of her narrative? (Hers is not the only voice in the novel, but the certainly the central one.) I imagine that Hunt has been compared to Faulkner. I'll look for more of his work.
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This was just a pretty odd book. There was a lot of viewpoint switching and time shifts, which was pretty confusing. I never fully made the connection between the characters in the prologue and anyone in the story itself. I knew the setting was shared, but I’m not sure if there’s more to it. I think the story had potency, but the way it was told was somewhat confusing and lost me at points.
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When I read Zorrie, I was sure that Laird Hunt would be my go-to. The last couple I've read, including this one, I struggled a bit with. Still great prose, just didn't connect. I look forward to more new work.
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I had high hopes of this one because I LOVED Neverhome so much...this was good reading, but not in the same league. Still gonna work my way through the rest of Hunt's books though :)
