A slyly satiric walking tour through the closing years of Israel's first half-century—as refracted through the mind of an ineffectual, quirky dreamer constitutionally beset by the most mundane details of his daily routine. Efraim Nisan is a middle-aged functionary who nightly records the jarring, revelatory dreams that alternate with a waking life scarcely less dreamlike in its episodic inconclusiveness. Fima has disappointed his father Baruch Nomberg, a right-wing cosmetics manufacturer, by settling for a job as receptionist at a gynecological clinic, and disappointed his ex-wife Yael Levin, an aeronautical researcher, by letting her walk away from their marriage and into the arms of supercilious American Ted Tobias. Fima keeps disappointing himself too on a daily basis. Fascinated by charismatic Uri Gefen, he settles for sleeping with his wife, Nina, who ends each dutiful bout of lovemaking by scrubbing herself, then scrubbing the toilet and sink as well. Drawn to clinic patient Annette Tadmor, he forces himself to listen over coffee and vodka to her litany of marital complaints, only to find that he's equally chagrined whether or not they end up in bed. Fima can't even kill a cockroach without being forestalled by its reflection of the vilified Jewish people. Drifting through the streets of Jerusalem convening his own imaginary cabinet meetings to solve the nation's political and moral problems, he's most satisfied only when he's playing with Dimi Tobias, Yael's ten-year-old son. All Fima's dissatisfied longings come to a head in a magical, climactic epiphany on a Friday afternoon ramble through Jerusalem and its sequel, which shows Fima finally coming to terms with his status as a present-day Wandering Jew. Deeply, sweetly comic in the manner of Gogol. Essayist and novelist Oz (To Know a Woman, 1991, etc.) has never focused such large matters so adroitly on such a delicate fulcrum—or created a more endearing hero.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-15-189851-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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