From Italian writer Bufalino (Lies of the Night, 1991): a rich feast of a novel that—with just the right mix of poignancy and comedy—details one golden summer's gift of love to a man whose youth had been spent amidst mud and blood. The narrator decides, now that he's old, to write a ``happy book'' about the summer he spent as a 30-ish high-school teacher in a town on the Sicilian coast—a time when he was ``twenty reborn'' and ``convalescent in the sun,'' enjoying that summer's gift to him, a gift owed him because of the war. Eager to love and forget, even if only for a month or two, he describes how he first falls in love with tempestuous Maria Venera, granddaughter of Don Alvise Salibba, one of the town's last aristocrats, who lives in a crumbling palazzo. Nonagenarian Don Alvise is a ``splendour of a fellow with the gift of the gab'' who loves to tell ``cynical, titillating yarns.'' The narrator's love is briefly shaken when Maria tells him she's pregnant by another man and asks him to help her get an abortion. Still obsessed with her beauty, he has a brief but intense affair with the discarded mistress of a local magnate, flirts with former pupils, and daydreams. But when his close friend becomes betrothed and Maria runs off with a French filmmaker, he realizes that all he's done is ``play-act love.'' The summer ends with his transfer, and now, years later, dying in Rome, he wonders whether ``memory behaves as the body does when confronted with an onslaught of microbes—a defence force isolates the most dangerous, and leaves them immortal but inert within us.'' These ``golden moments'' we resuscitate later in writing—that ``prosthesis of living.'' Witty, wise, and ebulliently literate: a modern fable about the tricks that love and memory play on us.
Pub Date: June 18, 1993
ISBN: 0-00-271048-X
Page Count: 175
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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