Full of truly unexpected twists and poignant turns, Grémillon’s subtly political drama reverberates long after the killer is...
When a psychoanalyst’s wife is murdered, one of his patients is so determined to prove his innocence that she becomes entwined in the case herself in this Argentina-set psychological thriller.
In 1987 Buenos Aires, the young wife of a prominent psychoanalyst plummets to her death from their sixth-floor apartment. Vittorio and Lisandra Puig’s relationship wasn’t always the most loving, and he’s soon arrested for her murder, much to the shock of Eva Maria Darienzo, one of his longtime patients. Grémillon (The Confidant, 2012) seamlessly weaves in Argentina’s bloody political history as Eva Maria grapples with the disappearance and murder of her daughter, Stella, five years earlier, presumed to be one of the desaparecidos killed during the country’s “dirty war.” Eva Maria begins her own unofficial investigation after Vittorio directs her to a secret stash of cassette tapes in his office, recordings of all his patients. As she listens to the sessions, which Grémillon expertly captures with the perfect mix of clinical specificity and voyeurism, Eva Maria becomes convinced that each successive patient—Alicia the despondent divorcée; Felipe the ex-junta wife-beater; even Miguel the musician, whose passion for the piano was beaten out of him during the war—could be Lisandra’s killer. Vittorio is equally convinced of their innocence, and the reader is soon unsure whom to trust, particularly after it’s revealed that Eva Maria turns to alcohol for comfort, much to the consternation of her surviving child, Estéban. One thing is clear, though it does not help narrow down a perpetrator: infidelity and jealously have poisoned Vittorio and Lisandra’s union.
Full of truly unexpected twists and poignant turns, Grémillon’s subtly political drama reverberates long after the killer is unmasked.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-312658-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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