Like its eponymous iceberg, this strained fictional mix of politics, affected profundity, and supposedly comic eroticism is as much about the obvious—a young man’s struggle to lose his virginity—as about what is hidden in the depths: Chilean history. Expatriate author Dorfman (Konfidenz, 1994, etc.) tells the story in flashbacks narrated by Gabriel McKenzie as he prepares a murder/suicide at the 1992 World Expo’s Chilean Pavilion, which boasts an iceberg as its main attraction. The action moves back and forth from Manhattan, where Gabriel lives in exile with his mother, Milagros, to his native land. Milagros, a political activist, left Chile with her son in 1974 after the killing of President Salvador Allende, and Gabriel’s life, further, is haunted by ChÇ Guevara, who died on the October day in 1967 that he was conceived, just hours after Milagros met Crist¢bal Mackenzie at a political rally. The couple marries, but in the meantime Cris has made a bet he will make love every day to his wife; an exhausted Milagros soon gives him permission to sleep with other women as long as he is faithful to her in spirit. This potentially funny and sexy device proves to be neither, and the discussions of Pinochet, capitalism, and Spain’s conquest become more rhetorical rants than perceptive insights. Visiting Chile in 1991, the virginal Gabriel is intimidated by his father’s legendary virility. Then he falls in love with the beautiful Amanda, daughter of one of his father’s friends, visits Antarctica to find the iceberg destined for the Expo, hears much political talk, and finally makes love. Distressed by a disturbing family secret (Amanda may be his sister) and by the lies and schemes that both he and Chile have connived at, he decides on a spectacular resolution. His dead Nanny, though, plots with ChÇ to save Gabriel and his family as they prepare to eat dinner at the Chilean Pavilion. A very busy tale that melts in the frenetic heat of its telling.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-374-21898-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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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