Initially, and fitfully engrossing, but the book turns into a harangue that just doesn’t know when to stop.
The brutality and carnage that comprise the legacy of Francisco Franco’s “Republican” regime reshape and afflict several lives in Catalan playwright and screenwriter Baulenas’s accusatory novel.
The present actions occur in 1949, when protagonist and narrator Genís Aleu, a sergeant in the Spanish Foreign Legion, returns to Barcelona following an eight-year exile—resolved to fulfill a promise made to his father Joan, who died in a prisoner of war camp. The past that burdens Genís is revealed in juxtaposed chapters that depict his family’s wartime experiences: how Joan, a commercial sign painter, was drawn into the chaos of Spain’s Civil War; the sufferings of his wife and son (then called “Niso”), when the latter was sent to a Dickensian Charity Home; and the burden accepted by Niso when his father, released and sent home to die, charged the boy with finding and reburying the body of Joan’s comrade Bartomeu Camús, who had been executed for loudly protesting the Franco regime’s many crimes against humanity. Baulenas gets good suspenseful mileage out of gradual discoveries made by the adult Genís (and hence the reader). The novel is especially compelling in scenes set at the charity home, and it’s also good at depicting the ironic circumstances of Genís’s return: He is assigned to lecture and recruit future foreign legionnaires at the combat-training facility built on the site of the former POW camp. There are vivid characterizations of Niso’s unflappable friend and mentor at the home, “No-Sister-Salvador”; of compassionate Sister Paula, who arouses both Niso’s social conscience and his embryonic libido; and of Genís’s Barcelona contact, flinty Major Cedazo, who will play a crucial role in the novel’s bitter denouement. But Baulenas repeatedly overstates his case, exposing his plot’s essential thinness while indulging in hyperbolic (albeit just, and perfectly understandable) excoriations of Franco and his murderous minions.
Initially, and fitfully engrossing, but the book turns into a harangue that just doesn’t know when to stop.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101255-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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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