Poignant and tender without being sentimental, the novel achieves its powerful emotive effects through simplicity and...
An unadorned and heartbreaking tale of a young boy coming of age during World War II.
Appelfeld (Laish, 2009, etc.) introduces us to Hugo Mansfeld, who is just about to turn 11 and who, without being aware of it, is more on the cusp of adulthood than of adolescence. Life in the ghetto has recently become unbearably tense and stressful. Hugo’s father, a pharmacist, has been taken to a labor camp, and his mother is desperately looking for somewhere safe to place her son, perhaps in a local village near the Carpathian Mountains. After several plans fall through because some possible rescuers have been transported to camps by the German authorities, Hugo’s mother places her son with Mariana, an old childhood friend who’s “fallen low.” Hugo quickly learns he is not allowed to go outside and must spend his nights in the closet of Mariana’s sumptuous bedroom. A quiet child who at first likes to spend his time playing chess and reading, Hugo is also sensitive, reflective and almost comically polite. It turns out that Mariana is a prostitute, and the place where she lives, The Residence, is a brothel, but for a while Mariana succeeds in keeping Hugo’s whereabouts a secret. Eventually, in her loneliness and alcoholic wooziness, she innocently takes Hugo to her bed for solace and companionship. He loves being comforted in Mariana’s warm embrace, but as life in this Ukrainian village comes under increasing threat from retreating Germans and advancing Russians, they become lovers. After Hugo has been with Mariana for over a year, the Residence closes down altogether, and they travel the sparse countryside, trying to pass themselves off as mother and son. In time, however, Mariana is caught, and the Russians don’t take kindly to women who have consorted with Germans. Throughout their harrowing ordeal Mariana tries to hold on to some semblance of faith in a God she feels she has abandoned—or vice versa.
Poignant and tender without being sentimental, the novel achieves its powerful emotive effects through simplicity and understatement—a beautiful read.Pub Date: March 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4280-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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