An atmospheric, smoky, sepia-toned whodunit, though more for fans of Camus than Chandler.
“Around us, you’re in danger of catching leprosy”: French Nobel Prize winner Modiano (Villa Triste, 2016, etc.) explores the criminal demimonde in a short but potent novel that’s as elegant as Claude Rains and as sinister as Peter Lorre.
An aspiring writer. A young woman with a mysterious past. An older man with nice clothes. The setup is classic Modiano, reminiscent of earlier works such as In the Café of Lost Youth. Originally published in French in 2012, five years after that predecessor volume, this novel turns on familiar elements. Jean, just beginning his career as a writer, carries a little notebook at all times, with jottings that occasionally intimate literature but more often serve as reminders of people he’s met and dates he has to keep, most notably with Dannie, a waiflike young woman whose every breath carries hints of dark secrets and the memory of a particular “nasty incident” about whose nature Jean can only guess. Is Dannie just light-fingered or with a finger on the trigger? It doesn’t help that the man called Aghamouri, who haunts hotels staffed by whispering Maghrebians and wears a beautiful camel coat, drops hints that give Jean the willies or that a police detective doesn’t bother to hide his professional interest in Dannie and her associates. Why does Dannie have access to a country estate? Why doesn’t Aghamouri ever have dinner with his wife? And, if he’s 30 years old and has a wife, what’s he doing hanging around college, apart from keeping an eye on Dannie, whom the world has nothing left to teach? The questions mount. It’s good that American publishers are catching up to Modiano’s recent works, having mined his output from the 1970s and beyond, but it’s a touch curious that this late-period Modiano seems bound up in old formulas, like a more literary but no more cheerful Simenon.
An atmospheric, smoky, sepia-toned whodunit, though more for fans of Camus than Chandler.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-77982-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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
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
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