First novel from Polish-born scholar and critic Appignanesi (Postmodernism, Ideas from France, etc.—not reviewed): a big, rich family romance that strives for intelligent characterizations while loading on entertainment values. Pivotal here is Sylvie Kowalska, a Polish teenager of great musical talent and equally strong erotic drive. While at a concert in Paris, Sylvie begins a steamy seduction of psychoanalyst Jacob Jardine and at the same time has a lesbian affair with fellow schoolgirl Caroline. Sylvie's flirting with men at cafes inflames Jacob and eventually drives him to marry her, although he knows that her sexual volatility can never be held in check by either of them. Jacob, before meeting Sylvie, has had a long affair with Mathilde, who now abandons him reluctantly to marry Prince Frederick of Denmark, a cold fish. Sylvie thinks Mathilde a rival. During the Nazi occupation, Sylvie saves Jacob's life when he is a prisoner; then, pregnant, she goes to Poland to see a beloved friend. While there, she has a boy baby but after delivery distractedly switches the boy for a girl baby to satisfy both Jacob and the memory of the now-dead Caroline, who's committed suicide. Sylvie is a vicious mother to baby Katherine, whose story takes over. Meanwhile, the switched baby boy, Jacob's real son Alexie Gismond, eventually becomes a famed Italian film director, then is told by Sylvie that he is her son—but she kills herself before explaining all to him. Alexie begins tracking down Katherine, who deeply loves Jacob, her so-called father. Waiting for the recognition scenes between Katherine and Jacob and between Katherine and her lover Alexie (whom she comes to believe is her brother) keeps the reader charged. But the story's resolution comes about irritatingly as a result of information from offstage. Lots of analysis, sex, and references to great artists make for gripping fun that never rises above fur-lined romance.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1992
ISBN: 0-525-93403-0
Page Count: 572
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
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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