Baricco sails uneasily between the cheap and deep, albeit sometimes grippingly.
From Italy’s prize-winning Baricco (City, 2002; Ocean Sea, 1999, etc.), a thinny-thin little tale that stretches credibility but takes up big imponderables.
After a war that’s unnamed but sounds like WWII, three men come to a remote farmhouse somewhere in Italy to slay another man: Manuel Roca, an erstwhile medical doctor from the losing side in the war, whose hospital, according to those now coming to kill him, was a Dr. Mengele–like place of torture and despair such that patients asked only for death (which one of the three men now present indeed gave to his own agonized brother when he found him in that hospital). The atrocities of Manuel Roca are hearsay to the reader, though the atrocities visited upon him are not, as he is first tortured and then killed, as his preteen son is machine-gunned into bits—and as his young daughter listens to all from a root cellar under the floor. The boy-monster, Tito, who does the machine-gunning, is also the one who opens the cellar and sees the girl lying down below—and spares her, if only because the other two killers don’t hear him shout that she’s there. So much for the book’s first half. In the second, an aging woman—the girl of the cellar—walks in a city, comes upon a man selling lottery tickets from inside a booth, begs him to close up shop and come with her to a café—where she reveals that she’s the girl he spared and that she knows he’s the killer Tito who, albeit by accident, let her live. The two talk, weep, reconstruct the events between then and now, events that include the apparent fact of the woman’s having tracked down the other two of the three killers and killed them in revenge. And so what does she have in mind, now, for the lost, aged, and haunted-by-the-past Tito?
Baricco sails uneasily between the cheap and deep, albeit sometimes grippingly.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4145-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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