Sincere but lifeless.
An inert second novel from Cuban-born Chicago Tribune culture reporter Obejas (stories: We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?, 1994, etc.) strains to illuminate the history of her native land and its Jews before and after the Revolution.
Narrator Alejandra San José, whose family fled Cuba on the day of the Bay of Pigs, is part of the problem here. Humorless, self-absorbed, and long-winded—the defining moment of her father’s life is hinted at so often that the eventual revelations are neither surprising nor interesting—she turns what could be a sweeping tale of identity, exile, and loyalty into a turgid clash between faith and nationalism. Moving back and forth from the present to1897, when patriarch Itzak fought heroically in Cuba’s War of Independence against Spain, Alexandra describes her family’s struggle to practice Judaism and her own ambivalence about her faith and her homeland. Like many others, her ancestors converted to Christianity to avoid persecution, but never forgot their Jewish roots. After Itzak had Alejandra’s father Enrique circumcised, some of the family began openly acknowledging their faith, despite the increasing anti-Semitism of the 1920s and ’30s. Her parents now live in Chicago, where Enrique is an esteemed translator of literature, but she senses a mystery about him that transcends the sadness of exile. In 1987, Alejandra returns to Cuba as a translator for touring Americans, meets old relatives and family friends, and learns more about her past and her faith. On further visits her sense of Cuban and Jewish identity grows as she observes the changes in Cuba after the Berlin Wall falls and describes how her relatives adjust to power failures, wealthy tourists, and rationing. When Enrique dies, Alejandra takes his ashes back to Cuba—where she will finally learn his long-dark secret from a childhood friend.
Sincere but lifeless.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-43921-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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