Pleasantly simple language, stark imagery and a surprisingly hopeful tone play nicely off each other in this promising,...
A man and a woman, each ruined in their own ways by a brutal North African prison camp, find solace in each other and embark on a difficult emotional journey.
Deep in an unnamed North African desert, 40 men suffer a fate arguably worse than death—left to languish indefinitely at the bottom of wells, they have contact with the world only once a day, when a guard changes the buckets they use for tepid water, rancid food and waste. A prisoner, Andrès, discovers one night that the guard has accidentally left a rope dangling in the well. Miraculously, he escapes and is discovered, half-dead, on the outskirts of the camp by Tamia, a beautiful woman who just found out (after seducing a guard) that her lover, Elijah, another prisoner, is dead. Tamia helps Andrès escape and nurses him back to health in the home of a nearby villager, a kind and lonely old woman who sees in the couple her estranged son and daughter. Andrès and Tamia fall tentatively in love, but each is still haunted by memories of those that they left behind—Elijah, for whom Tamia risked everything, and Andrès’ wife, Léa. When Andrès is well, they travel back to the capital to stay with Tamia’s sister and her husband, a cousin of Elijah. There, they must face several truths—Léa, believing that Andrès was dead, has remarried. And Andrès, once a member of a terrorist resistance movement, discovers that he had known Elijah, and that he had been hiding many secrets from Tamia. Not only was Elijah a leader of the resistance movement, which surprised Tamia, but he was also known to be a traitor working as a double agent for the police. This betrayal, as well as the knowledge that he might actually be alive somewhere in Syria, leaves her with many decisions, particularly now that much of her loyalty lies with Andrès.
Pleasantly simple language, stark imagery and a surprisingly hopeful tone play nicely off each other in this promising, though quiet, debut novel.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84343-256-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harvill UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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