Kirshenbaum offers many finely nuanced moments and raises unexpected moral issues—about Germany and the Jews, about the...
The story of two lovers whose lives are profoundly shaken by echoes of the Holocaust: a German medievalist and the woman who, while writing his biography, falls in love with him.
Born and raised in New York City, Hester Rosenfeld quickly discarded the embarrassing ways of her Jewish immigrant parents, with their longing to become, in her eyes sentimentally, “American.” Since leaving them behind, she has risen through the academy and even achieved modest commercial success with her “kitchen table histories”—featuring the everyday lives of unremarkable people. Though her specialty has been Colonial America, she meets Heinrich Falk (b. 1943)—referred to throughout as HF—and is mesmerized by his steely German good looks. The sex, as in most Kirshenbaum fictions (Pure Poetry, 2000, etc.), is earth-moving, and Hester happily adopts the role of official mistress to the married Falk, even as she researches the history of his numerous past infidelities, quartet of marriages, and irrepressible womanizing. As it happens, Falk has no official, verifiable Nazi darkness in his past—a brother in the Hitler Youth who possibly engaged in terrorism, an aunt who joined the Nazi party early—yet when Falk, overtired and frustrated, cautions Hester against seeming to be “a greedy Jew,” she realizes she cannot abide him any longer. During her research, she comes to terms with aspects of her own ambivalence toward her parents (she learns they were forced to flee Falk’s hometown of Munich) but resists Falk’s attempts to get her to look closely at her own past. Hester and Falk angrily part ways, having realized that they—and their histories—are forever irreconcilable.
Kirshenbaum offers many finely nuanced moments and raises unexpected moral issues—about Germany and the Jews, about the nature of history and biography—but this is not a novel of strenuous moral purpose. It'll be most enjoyed for its agile style and Hester’s distinctively intelligent voice.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-04152-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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