A disappointing collection with two-dimensional characters prioritizes politics over story.
Three stories about Haiti that place women at the forefront.
Seghers (Stone Age, 1977, etc.) was a German Jewish writer who fled Hitler’s regime in 1933. In exile, she wrote a few novels about escapees from Nazi prison camps. They’re smart, politically savvy books, with all the drama and pacing of good thrillers. Unfortunately, Seghers’ last book, published in 1980 and now appearing in English for the first time, doesn’t live up to her early work. These stories are about Haitian women; each piece takes place in a different century. An erudite introduction by the scholar Marike Janzen insists that Seghers is giving voice to the voiceless, placing Haiti at the forefront of revolutionary history. That’s all well and good, but the stories themselves tend toward condescension. In the first, Toaliina, a young woman, dives from a ship that is attempting to transport Indigenous Haitian women to Spain in the 15th century. She hides out in a cave, where she is joined by her husband, Tshanangi. Then Tshanangi disappears, and his friend appears in the cave, seeking refuge. Toaliina, writes Seghers, “lived with this friend, not as happy as before, but without hardship. She bore him two children.” Perhaps the larger problem with this collection is that Seghers seems distracted by the political points she wants to make. The tone, throughout, is didactic—and not really conducive to storytelling. The characters devolve into mouthpieces for Seghers, and even the plots become muddled. An essay included in the collection describes the Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture, but even here, Seghers disappoints. The essay, which seems short on real, substantive research, rambles on without achieving insight. Taken as a whole, this volume might be useful to scholars of Seghers, but to a lay audience, it doesn’t do her reputation any favors.
A disappointing collection with two-dimensional characters prioritizes politics over story.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-944884-63-5
Page Count: 107
Publisher: Dialogos
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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