This incandescent elegy to age, change, and acceptance burns with an urgency that seems to have pared Calisher’s...
Calisher is the bridesmaid of contemporary American fiction: for more than 50 years an imposingly brilliant stylist whose densely declarative and analytical, richly woven fiction has never achieved the canonical status awarded to many writers far less accomplished.
Calisher has skirted obscurity (in her ebullient “space opera” Journal from Ellipsia, 1965, and In the Palace of the Movie King, 1994), but at her best (Standard Dreaming, 1972, and Mysteries of Motion, 1983, her complex, luminous short stories), she has surveyed the recently concluded century at all its personal, familial, social, and global levels with a verbal eloquence and intensity of observation that make her writing mandatory, if demanding, reading. Sunday Jews, her 15th novel, published in her 91st year, is a summa, and a triumph. Its tower-of-strength central figure is Zipporah Zangwill, an eminent anthropologist and the 60ish Manhattan matriarch of an extended family of intellectuals and activists who define themselves, and are defined by others, by both their adherence to Zipporah’s Jewish heritage and the degrees to which they have fulfilled, or failed to fulfill, their various potentials. When Zipporah’s beloved husband, philosophy professor Peter Duffy, begins a slow decline into senility, she decides to sell their townhouse and stimulate Peter’s enfeebled faculties by touring all the exotic places she had visited and studied. This decision triggers a seamless interweaving of memory, meditation, and narrative, as Zipporah’s plans resolve themselves into a patient, courageous vigil that also becomes an almost unbearably moving celebration of a long and happy marriage. Interpolated stories depicting the conflicted lives of the Zangwill-Duffy children (the most interesting of them is Nell, a world-weary attorney who has borne two illegitimate children) are amply and interestingly developed, but really only secondary. The fulcrum of this rich tale is the love that bonds Zipporah to her husband and also to her splendid grandson Bert, the unlikely vessel through whom all that she cares for will be preserved.
This incandescent elegy to age, change, and acceptance burns with an urgency that seems to have pared Calisher’s often-reviled ornate style down to a taut, focused simplicity and purity. She has often before written as fervently, even as generously, but she has never written better.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100930-9
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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