Albania-born, Paris-based Kadarâ (Broken April, 1990, etc.) returns with a nightmarish tale from the dark side of totalitarianism (a book first published in 1981 in Albania and ``immediately banned''): a young man finds employment in a mammoth state-run institution for dream analysis, only to see the job become his life as he rises through the ranks. Mark-Alem belongs to the illustrious Quprili family, which for hundreds of years has served as the right hand to the rulers of the Empire—even though occasionally purged from power under suspicion of treason. Appointed to the Tabir Sarrail, or Palace of Dreams, a maze of endless empty corridors and bureaucracy in which minions labor ceaselessly to interpret the night thoughts of the land in order to produce the weekly Master-Dream used to guide State policy, he is assigned to Selection, where noteworthy dreams are categorized and culled from the rest. However, he is promoted swiftly to the inner sanctum, the Interpretation group, being told simply by the Director: ``You suit us.'' With reality receding from him under pressure from long hours spent in contemplation of others' dreams, he is caught unawares when a family gathering is disrupted and his favorite uncle is arrested and executed—events brought on by the reading of seditious intent in a dream that Mark- Alem himself handled but was unable to interpret. An ensuing shakeup in the Palace of Dreams leaves him miraculously in charge, a victory of sorts for his family—which he dutifully records in the Quprili Chronicle but which gives him no optimism for the future. Brooding, mysterious in its dreamlike states and logic: a memorable portrait of a man powerless before the caprices of Fate and its handmaiden, the State.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1993
ISBN: 0-688-11183-1
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
IN THE NEWS
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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