The last two novels of French writer Bove (The Stepson, 1994, etc.), contemporary and friend of Gide and Beckett, evoke in stunning, characteristically minimalist prose the plight of an intellectual antihero forced to act by war. Published separately after Bove's death in 1945, these final works of his career have an interconnected plot as well as the same narrator/protagonist: RenÇ de Talhouet, a French soldier on the run. Together, they describe the acts and attitudes that will culminate in Talhouet's eventual choice of the only liberty possible for a man of his sensibilities. In Night Departure, RenÇ, a German prisoner of war, persuades a group of his French fellows to escape. But RenÇ kills two German guards, and though the prisoners escape, their long walk through Germany is shadowed by knowledge of the retribution that awaits them if captured. Cowardly, prickly, and sensitive to the point of paranoia, RenÇ is obsessively and increasingly fearful and suspicious. He can't sleep because he fears the comrade on watch will be negligent, and he often goes hungry because he mistrusts the local peasants' help. After an arduous journey, he reaches Paris, but No Place suggests that freedom in occupied France is as elusive as in a German camp. RenÇ stays with friends and relations but never feels safe. His fears, as he himself observes, are not only real but existential: ``...the problem with thinking too much is that in the end you never do anything and you always look suspicious.'' Finally, he's caught, imprisoned, then released, but it's too late: Freedom is not possible in France, and so RenÇ flees to Spain, where certain imprisonment and death await. A masterful, always understated, portrait of a man as much imprisoned by his own inner demons as by circumstances. And a reminder of how tragic Bove's early death was.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-941423-91-3
Page Count: 467
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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
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
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