An exceptional debut, sensitive and rich without sentimentality.
A finely crafted first novel that, in the form of a young woman’s childhood recollections of her mother, creates a portrait of the last days of Franco’s Spain.
Young Maria de los Milagros, known to one and all as Milagrosa, has no one to blame but herself if she’s not a child prodigy: after all, her mother Carmen began taking her to school at the age of two. That, admittedly, was more for her mother’s benefit than hers—Carmen was the village schoolmistress and saw no reason to waste good money on a babysitter—but it gave Milagrosa something of a head start all the same. A sensitive and sheltered girl, Milagrosa is nevertheless completely overshadowed by her strong and outgoing mother. Used to getting her way, Carmen does not suffer fools gladly: in one of her fits of pique, she even punched out the mayor and was subsequently dismissed from her post. Undeterred, she took a position in her old hometown and moved back with her daughter, sister, and mother (her husband, who refused to move, was unceremoniously left behind). In her new surroundings, during the 1960s, Milagrosa grows up surrounded by all the old certitudes of Spain—making her First Communion; listening to Franco’s weekly radio broadcasts—but her coming-of-age is troubled by storm clouds of change looming over Spain and her family alike. Carmen finds herself the victim of a rebellion after her mother dies, when her nephew Arturo stands up to her and demands that his mother receive her fair share (i.e., the greater part) of the estate. That’s bad enough, but soon the whole country seems on the verge of turmoil when the elderly Franco falls deathly ill. Can Spain survive without Carmen’s beloved caudillo? Can Carmen? The old ways die hard, but hardest of all for the old themselves.
An exceptional debut, sensitive and rich without sentimentality.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2002
ISBN: 1-903517-07-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dedalus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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