Fragmentation and disintegration—in the body politic and in the realm of human relations’seem to be the themes of this frustratingly cryptic debut novel by the prizewinning young German author (stories: 33 Moments of Happiness, 1998). Schulze employs a structure similar to that of his collection. Here, we get a piecemeal portrayal, in 29 interrelated chapters (each prefaced by a brief summary of its contents), of a dozen or so inhabitants of the town of Altenburg, in the decade (the 1990s) following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Germany’s supposed “reunification.” Each chapter presents a conversation or confrontation, begun in medias res, involving two or more Altenburgers whose daily lives and destinies are entwined in ways that are only gradually—and even then incompletely—made clear to the reader. For example, we’re introduced to Renate Meurer and her depressive, unemployable second husband Ernst during their vacation in Italy before we hear about her former husband, a physician whose political allegiances provoked their separation, or about Renate’s son Martin, a widower still mourning his wife’s death in a traffic accident and incapable of raising their two sons—the younger of whom lives with Danny, a journalist—whose rocky relationship with Edgar, an ex-Communist Youth activist turned “ad rep” echoes several other stalled or combative marriages, love affairs, and family situations. The story’s best moments are those that express its central concerns with either dramatic directness (as in the case of Doctor Barbara Hotlitzschek, married to a politician too cautious to condemn even neo-Nazi violence) or with wry symbolism (the accident-prone trials of “wannabe writer” Heinrich “Enrico” Friedrich, who “had come to . . . [the] realization that nobody wanted to read his stuff, and . . . thrown himself head over heels down the stairs”). A first novel that impresses with its cleverness, but ultimately disappoints: Schulze has neglected to create characters interesting enough to make us care what happens to them.
Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40541-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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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