Something new from the acclaimed Israeli author of, most recently, The Book of Intimate Grammar (1994): an Alice-in- Wonderlandlike adventure tale expressing a 13-year-old boy's family confusions, fears, and fantasies. The story begins as motherless Amnon ``Nonny'' Feuerberg sits aboard a train that will take him from his home in Jerusalem to Haifa for an extended visit with his uncle, a ``distinguished educator'' and author. Nonny's widowed father, a police detective, wants some time alone with his fretful mistress (and secretary) Gagi—who, Nonny believes, is preparing to dump her undemonstrative and indifferent lover. The overimaginative boy rehearses in his mind conversations he's sure they must be having—and shortly experiences outrageous occurrences that, we gradually realize, are fantasized extensions of things he has half-heard and half- understood. For example, Nonny observes an eerie exchange of identities between a uniformed policeman and the criminal handcuffed to him, then is taken in tow (if not ``kidnapped'') by Felix Glick, a 70ish dandy who identifies himself as a master criminal, brings his young companion to the home of famous actress Lola Ciperola (who, not at all coincidentally, is Gabi's idol), and eventually reveals his own relationship to Nonny's heritage. These picaresque doings are frequently interrupted by Nonny's recall of earlier escapades (such as the time when his dream of becoming ``the first Israeli matador'' led to an embarrassing assault on a neighbor's cow). In piecemeal fashion, this descent into memories and dreams clarifies Nonny's inchoate knowledge of his long-dead beautiful mother: specifically, her tainted past and how it has intensified his desperate need to know who he is (``I was the son of a policeman and a criminal,'' he painfully concludes). Not nearly as much fun as it sounds. Grossman's fifth novel is so arch and opaque that it fails to draw the reader in. By the time we understand the motives behind Nonny's wild inventions, we've stopped caring about him. (First printing of 75,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-29692-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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