Dazzling early Calvino, stories from the mid-Forties and the Fifties. There are four categories: "Riviera Stories," "Wartime Stories," "Postwar Stories"—and "Stories of Love and Loneliness," in which some of Calvino's later, expanded-on conceptual concerns (reading, photography, people uncomfortable within the environments they've created themselves) have begun to emerge. And the most wonderful of these, as comic as it is metaphysically profound, is "The Adventure of a Bather": a matron, swimming alone, loses the bottom of her bathing suit and cannot emerge from the sea, realizing that it is her nakedness now that has become the greater sea, overtaking and overcoming her like an error that must be paid for. Likewise, the "Riviera Stories"—sun-shot, fragile works—align with Calvino's interest in fairy tales; each is about an Eden of sorts, with illusions of happiness, farces of shame, and Oblomovian cheerfulness ("Lazy Sons") in the face of objective defect. But the surprise for English-speaking readers, most of whom know only later Calvino, will be the "Wartime" and "Postwar" stories. In the first group Calvino details the horrors of war with enormous realist dignity—focusing on Italian peasants whose cunning is the sole weapon left to defend themselves with; the terror is made strangely more terrible by the peasants' blend of naivete and keen perceptions. (How bullets, for instance, somehow make the whole world feel as if it's made mostly of air.) And, though more relaxed and humorous, the "Postwar Stories" are abrim with the same humanity: burglars in a bakery, prostitute shortages, sleeping arrangements of refugees in a train station, the accommodating schedule of a streetwalker's husband—all funny, sad, unstressed, something like little De Sica films. Calvino, unlike Dine Buzzati (above), eschews heavy and sentimental ironies; unlike Borges, his metafictional resources have no scorn to them, instead a darting kind of tact. In sum: wondrous work from the early career of one of the world's greatest living writers.?
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1984
ISBN: 0156260557
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
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
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
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