A vivid narrative of faith, but, by its very nature, limited in scope and appeal.
Israeli novelist Sabato (Aleppo Tales, 2004, etc.) portrays a simple man living an uneventful life of piety.
Ezra Siman Tov’s twilight years are explicated in chapters that combine small stories, parables and religious text with tedious lists of the day’s routines, most of which are devoted to religious practice. Ezra works in a laundry, but his life is devoted to God. He spends every spare moment at the synagogue or in private prayer, reciting psalms or studying ethical teachings. Although he honors his wife and children, this is a story of a man and his maker, not a man and his family. Ezra is praised by the good people of Jerusalem for his kindness, and indeed the stories he is famous for are all tales of the joy he derives from worship. The city’s Great Writer is his friend and comes to depend on him for narrative inspiration. Ezra’s brother-in-law, Dr. Tawil, a pompous scholar of medieval verse, is eventually humbled by Ezra’s wisdom. Yeshiva student Moishe Dovid, who is in the habit of chastising the uneducated Ezra, begins to see the worth of his genuine, undecorated piety. The pleasure Ezra enjoys from living in the sheltering faith of God is acknowledged by all, but will change as the city begins to chip away at the things he loves. When the laundry must close to make way for a broader street and a shopping center, Ezra feels that at last he will have enough time to study the Torah in depth. Then his beloved rabbi and mentor dies. Services are discontinued at his synagogue; classes are canceled at another to make way for more contemporary ideas. An office building is raised next to his apartment, blocking the sunlight to his once-flowering veranda. The old way of life, Ezra’s Jerusalem of tireless devotion, is being brushed aside by a more secular modernity.
A vivid narrative of faith, but, by its very nature, limited in scope and appeal.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-59264-140-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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