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Bound With These Titles
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Summary
Summary
Pulitzer Prize winner and American master Anne Tyler brings us an inspired, witty and irresistible contemporary take on one of Shakespeare's most beloved comedies
Kate Battista feels stuck. How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and uppity, pretty younger sister Bunny? Plus, she's always in trouble at work - her pre-school charges adore her, but their parents don't always appreciate her unusual opinions and forthright manner.
Dr. Battista has other problems. After years out in the academic wilderness, he is on the verge of a breakthrough. His research could help millions. There's only one problem: his brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr, all would be lost.
When Dr. Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he's relying - as usual - on Kate to help him. Kate is furious: this time he's really asking too much. But will she be able to resist the two men's touchingly ludicrous campaign to bring her around?
Author Notes
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 25, 1941. She graduated from Duke University at the age of 19 and completed graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. Before becoming a full-time author, she worked as a librarian and bibliographer.
Her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, was published in 1964. Her other works include Saint Maybe, Back When We Were Grownups, Digging to America, Noah's Compass, The Beginner's Goodbye, A Spool of Blue Thread, and Vinegar Girl. She has won several awards including the PEN Faulkner Award in 1983 for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Accidental Tourist, and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons. The Accidental Tourist was adapted into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. In 2018 her title, Clock Dance, made the bestsellers list.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the latest of Hogarth's Shakespeare series, Pulitzer-winner Tyler transposes the famously shrewish Kate and her would-be master Petruchio to Tyler country-Baltimore's genteel Roland Park neighborhood. There, preschool assistant Kate Battista takes care of her widowed father and much younger, conventionally prettier sister, both of whom take her for granted-that is, until her scientist father decides that the way to keep Pyotr, his research assistant, from losing his visa is for Kate to marry him. Considering Dr. Battista's maladroit personality and Pyotr's blunt and sometimes overly literal approach, Kate, who is less shrewish than plainspoken, actually seems quite patient. Though farcical in parts, Shakespeare's play has a dark strand-Petruchio is borderline abusive, and critics are divided about whether Kate's speech calling for women to obey their husbands is meant to be sincere, ironic, or perhaps a sign of love. In Tyler's version, Kate's speech is supportive of Pyotr, and defensible. Which makes sense, since Kate and Pyotr, despite their untoward and hasty courtship, clearly like and appreciate each other. Ultimately, the tale succeeds as the kind of love story in which the most surprised people are the protagonists-which, arguably, could be said of the original as well-but Shakespeare's powerful emotions are absent here. It is not the shrew who is tamed, but the tale itself. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Marking the 400th anniversary of the Bard's death, the Hogarth Shakespeare project invites prominent novelists (future participants include Margaret Atwood, Tracy Chevalier, and Gillian Flynn) to retell the stories of his indelible plays. Resplendent storyteller Tyler (A Spool of Blue Thread, 2015) is perfectly paired with The Taming of the Shrew. In Tyler's present-day improvisation on this tale of a coerced marriage, the widower father is Dr. Battista, a monomaniacal medical researcher who depends on his older, dagger-tongued, whip-smart, renegade daughter, Kate, to run the household. Having abandoned college in an intellectual huff, she now channels her botanical ardor into gardening, while trying to keep boys away from her cute, flirty younger sister and working reluctantly at a preschool, seeding dissent among her little charges. The eccentric family couldn't be more insular, until Dr. Battista brings his precious lab assistant home for dinner, clumsily attempting to strike a spark between obliging Pyotr and outraged Kate. Whatever is her father up to? Could it be that he's seeking a solution to Pyotr's impending deportation back to Russia? Surely a woman as resolutely independent as Kate wouldn't compromise her freedom for a green-card scheme? Deeply and pleasurably inspired by her source, Tyler is marvelously nimble and effervescent in this charming, hilarious, and wickedly shrewd tale of reversal and revelation.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE KING AND QUEEN OF MALIBU: The True Story of the Battle Tor Paradise, by David K. Randall. (Norton, $15.95.) In the late 19 th century, Frederick Rindge headed West with his wife, May, and bought an enormous secluded ranch, which they thought would guarantee them eternal privacy. When nearby homesteaders began clamoring for rights along their private beach, the conflict devolved into an acrimonious battle whose legacy is still felt. THE NORTH WATER, by Ian McGuire. (Picador, $16.) An opium-addicted Irish surgeon, his reputation ruined during the siege of Delhi in 1857, joins the crew of a whaling ship, where he encounters a psychopathic harpooner motivated by violence. McGuire's novel, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2016, is "propelled by a vision that is savage, brutal and relentless," our reviewer, Colm Toibin, said. WE WERE FEMINISTS ONCE: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement, by Andi Zeisler. (PublicAffairs, $16.99.) Zeisler, a founding editor of Bitch magazine, chronicles the movement's relation to mainstream culture, from when the "f-word" was largely taboo to now, when brands co-opt the term. Today's "glossy, feel-good feminism," she says, threatens to divert attention from the real issue: systemic inequality. TRAVELERS REST, by Keith Lee Morris. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) When a snowstorm derails their travel plans, to bring home an uncle from rehab, the Addisons seek refuge at a hotel in Good Night, Idaho, an eerie town where little is as it appears to be. The family are soon separated in the town and must try to find their way back to each other. Morris "has an adroit hand for characterization and atmosphere; the people feel real even when they actually are stand-ins for the uncanny," our reviewer, N. K. Jemisin, said. DEATH'S SUMMER COAT: What the History of Death and Dying Can Tell Us About Life and Living, by Brandy Schillace. (Pegasus, $16.95.) The reluctance to discuss death in modern Western societies is a relatively new development, Schillace notes. She investigates other cultures' mortality rituals, from "death cafes" to mourning practices in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge's mass killings, as a way to lend new perspectives about grief. VINEGAR GIRL: William Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" Retold, by Anne Tyler. (Hogarth Shakespeare, $15.) In Tyler's reimagining, Kate - a preschool teacher loved by her students but unpopular with their parents - is roped into a green card marriage plot: Her father, a biologist working on a project his colleagues have all but dismissed, is desperate to keep his research assistant in the country.
Guardian Review
A brusque nursery school teacher is pitted against a Russian lab assistant in this intelligent revamp of The Taming of the Shrew Dysfunctional family relationships are Anne Tyler 's forte, and her retelling of The Taming of the Shew, part of the Hogarth Press's initiative to give Shakespeare plays a prose remodelling to mark the 400th anniversary of his death, gives her plenty to work with. In Tyler's revamping, the shrew is Kate Battista, an acerbic preschool teacher with a bad hairdo and an unapologetic line in abrasive truths ("I hate small children ... They're not very bright, if you've noticed"). Once a "thorny child" and a "sullen teenager", Kate is now housekeeper and general dogsbody to her scientist father, the controlling and selfish Dr Battista, and her nubile teenage sister, Bunny. When a prestigious research project of Dr Battista's is threatened by the imminent deportation of his brilliant Russian lab assistant, Pyotr Cherbakov, he decides to marry his eldest daughter off to get the young man a green card. Tyler gives what appears to be a simple pre-feminist fable a number of adroit tweaks. Shakespeare's blunt shrew-tamer, Petruchio, is one of his more problematic male characters. In a neat twist, Tyler rewrites his boorishness as foreignness. With his article-less speech and habit of intoning snippets of gnomic Russian wisdom, Pyotr is as much an outsider in polite society as Kate: "In my country we have proverb," Pyotr was saying. Don't they always, Kate thought. "We say, 'Work when it is divided into segments is shorter total period of time than work when it is all together in one unit.'" "Catchy," Kate said. Next to saccharine, faddishly vegetarian Bunny, Kate -- who chomps on a stash of beef jerky she keeps in her pocket -- seems like a "viperish, disapproving old maid". But Kate knows perfectly well that Bunny, who "could be surprisingly crafty, on occasion", is not what she pretends to be. Her sweetness and her convictions are both strategic. Or as Pyotr -- the one man who is immune to Bunny's appeal -- puts it, "she is puffing her hair and blinking her eyes and abandoning animal proteins" in order to trap a mate. While not being supposed to date, Bunny is surrounded by a swarm of boyfriends, including the pothead boy next door, whom she sneaks in under the pretext that he is giving her Italian lessons. Kate's cussedness stems from anger at having to operate in a world that falls for such manipulations. Other women get ahead by using their sexual wiles, but Kate refuses to play. Just how undesirable is Kate really? Like Petruchio insisting that his is "the prettiest Kate in Christendom", Pyotr falls into raptures, which are increasingly unfeigned, over Kate's "hair that avoids beauty parlours" and her foot stamping, which makes her "resemble flamingo dancer". Her family are appalled by her outspokenness; Pyotr finds her bluntness comical. Tyler has fun spelling out what Shakespeare implies: that the shrew, despite her lack of conventional feminine appeal, is in fact beautiful, witty and honest, and that only the eccentric Pyotr has the originality to see this. The battle between them is watered down, but there are ripples from the original play for those who care to look. The comfortless country house to which Petruchio takes Katharina becomes a run-down bedsit, the stumbling horse on which he conveys her there, a clapped-out Volkswagen. The newlyweds' verbal sparring ramps up in a series of heated exchanges about the fate of Pyotr's lab mice, which are kidnapped in a subplot involving Bunny's dodgy suitor. Kate boasts that she can take Pyotr on "with one hand tied behind me", but she is drawn to the challenge and the chance of freedom he represents. In all of this, Tyler draws out the warning implicit in the play: that if men will persist in finding weakness and deviousness in women sexually attractive, they are going to get the half-formed partners they deserve. At her school Kate is often "downright astonished by how much the women in the faculty lounge sounded like the little girls nattering away in Room 4". Other men make Kate "feel too big and too gruff and too shocking", but Pyotr is "the kind of person who liked her true self, for better or for worse". By taking him as her husband, the shrew doesn't surrender her moxie, but rather finds a counterweight to her own strength. The balance of power the two Kates and their Petruchios achieve is the basis of a successful marriage. This sparky, intelligent spin on Shakespeare's controversial classic demolishes the old saw that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar with a simple question posed by Pyotr. That may be true, he says -- but why would you want to catch flies? - Elizabeth Lowry.
Kirkus Review
As her contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare project, Tyler (A Spool of Blue Thread, 2015, etc.) takes on the thankless task of modernizing The Taming of the Shrew. You don't have to think Shrew is irredeemably sexistShakespeare's take on gender roles is always more nuanced than it seemsto quickly tire of its knockabout humor. But once you get rid of Kate's storming and Petruchio's boorishness, what's left? In Tyler's version, a sharp-tongued preschool assistant, Kate Battista, whose scientist father is convinced his dead-end research will soon break throughif only he can hang onto his lab assistant, Pyotr Shcherbakov, whose O-1 visa is about to expire. That's right, Dr. Battista wants Kate to marry Pytor to keep him in the country: after all, he points out, she doesn't exactly have men flocking after her like her airhead sister Bunny, and she's still in high school. Kate is hurt by her father's thoughtless cruelty, and already these characters have more depth than Shakespeare allows his broadly drawn protagonists. What they don't have is much energy; Pyotr in particular moves tentatively through the story, never quite sure (as he tells Kate in a rather touching scene) that he's correctly reading the cultural cues in this strange country. The real drama is between Kate and her widowed father, who depends on her without really valuing her; even self-absorbed Bunny turns out to have more appreciation for her sister than the selfish Dr. Battista. That's sort of the point, we see, in Tyler's version of Kate's submission speech from Shrew, transformed here into a lecture on how pathetic men are. Tyler can't help but invest this mishmash with a good deal of her own rueful humor and tart compassion for her bewildered characters, but her special qualities as a writer don't make a very good fit with the original. Neither a faithful retelling nor a trenchant countertale, though agreeable enough as an afternoon's entertainment. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The third installment of the Hogarth Shakespeare series transfers the 16th--century comedy The Taming of the Shew, set in Padua, Italy, to Tyler's familiar territory, a contemporary Baltimore neighborhood. The Bard's obdurate, would-be lovers Katherina and Petruchio become Kate Battista, a temperamental, small children-averse preschool assistant on probation, and Pyotr Shcherbakov, the much-favored brilliant lab assistant of Kate's autoimmune disorder-fighting scientist father. As independent as Kate believes herself to be, she feels plenty put upon taking care of her absent-minded dad and her sought-after younger sister (Shakespeare's Bianca morphs into popular high schooler Bunny). When Kate discovers that Dr. Battista's plans to keep Pyotr employed beyond his three-year visa specifically include her.well, the shrew's taming is about to ensue. While Tyler clearly draws on the centuries-old original, her updated version could easily stand alone as an entertainingly eccentric family love story. Popular reader Kirsten Potter narrates with her usual energy, although the indeterminable accent she bestows on Pyotr feels unnecessarily heavy, even contrived. VERDICT That quibble aside, Tyler groupies will appreciate access to multiple formats to enjoy new work from a favorite author. Recommended. ["The Taming of the Shrew meets Green Card in this delightful reinvention that owes as much to Tyler's quirky sensibilities as it does to its literary forebear": LJ 5/1/16 starred review of the Hogarth: Crown hc.; June 2016 -LibraryReads top pick.]-Terry Hong, -Smithsonian BookDragon, -Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.