No big points made here, just strong storytelling combined with thoughtful exploration of difficult issues.
A necklace with a peacock pendant raises provocative questions about loss, guilt and recovery in Waldman’s intriguing new novel (Red Hook Road, 2010, etc.).
The necklace is one of thousands of items confiscated from Hungary’s Jews and found on a train seized in Austria by the U.S. Army in 1945. Assigned to guard the train, Lt. Jack Wiseman falls in love with Ilona, a Holocaust survivor. When she leaves him for a new life in Palestine, the devastated Jack takes the necklace as a memento. In 2013, dying of pancreatic cancer, he asks his granddaughter Natalie to return it. But to whom? She learns in Budapest that the necklace was depicted in Portrait of Frau E, a lost painting by a Hungarian Jewish artist who died during World War II. Amitai, an Israeli-born specialist in the recovery of art stolen during the Holocaust, persuades Natalie to join his search for Portrait of Frau E in hopes of identifying the necklace’s rightful owner. Painting and necklace both wind up in unexpected hands, and the narrative rolls back to trace the history of “Frau E.” Her maiden name is Nina Schillinger, and in 1913 she is a 19-year-old feminist whose desire to study medicine has prompted her appalled parents to send her to a psychoanalyst. (His account of their sessions provides a wickedly funny satire of sexist, sex-obsessed Freudian analysis.) Waldman paints morally complex portraits in her three linked stories. Jack’s superiors blithely furnish their quarters with tableware and crystal from the Hungarian train; the appealing Amitai retrieves looted art for profit; Budapest’s prewar Jewish bourgeoisie places crippling constraints on its daughters. Yet all three stories also show love prompting people to transcend their limitations and behave with new compassion, though Waldman is too honest not to acknowledge that it’s not always easy to do the right thing—or even to know what that is.
No big points made here, just strong storytelling combined with thoughtful exploration of difficult issues.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-53354-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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