A brilliant, quirky entertainment.
In his sophomore novel, Bosnian-born writer Stanišic (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, 2008) meditates on history, real and counterfactual.
Fürstenfelde is a sleepy little burg somewhere down along the German-Polish border, territory whose cultural conflicts have proved such fertile ground for Günter Grass. Not much happens there; the wolves stir and the woodpeckers peck, while a diligent vixen sniffs her way through one henhouse after another to feed her kits. Not much happens, that is, until the ferryman goes missing right before the Feast of Saint Anne, a high point on the local calendar. “Big hairy terrorist-type beard, fingernails and all that,” mutters the narrator, who marvels all the same at the way the ferry provides a little light at night. Readers with a sense of classical mythology will be alert to the possibilities when death, or at least the oarsman across the River Styx, takes a holiday. When time stands still, history becomes a jumble; one of the townspeople finds her nicely done hairdo squashed by a Pickelhaube, or spiked helmet, of a century past, while another, bound up in the doings of the old East German police state, is given to saying portentous things such as (this time concerning the vixen) “if a chicken is fearless, that doesn’t make it brave.” Another principal is introduced with a near-Homeric epithet each time he appears: “Herr Schramm, former Lieutenant-Colonel in the National People’s Army, then a forester, now a pensioner.” In the face of a neo-Nazi rally in town, first-generation Nazis are still in view, and when the town archive is broken into, stories from other times and voices come tumbling out. Stanišic’s yarn is a sprawling mess at first glance, but as it unfolds, it’s clear that he has given great thought to structure, to repeated and echoed motifs and themes, and in the end each element in the storyline ties up more or less neatly, if sometimes with a little confusion in getting there.
A brilliant, quirky entertainment.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941040-39-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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