Probably too ornate for some, but a beautifully written story that carries great weights of meaning.
Israeli poet and novelist Shalev (Love Life, 2000) returns with a highly polished and deeply metaphoric account of a troubled marriage.
Somewhat in the tradition of Gregor Samsa, protagonist Udi wakes up in Jerusalem one morning to find that he has a big problem—he can’t move. Udi’s wife Naama and his daughter Noga try to rouse him, but he remains paralyzed. At the hospital, however, all of Udi’s doctors and all of the doctors’ tests agree: There is nothing wrong with him. So they send him to the psychiatrists, who find themselves equally at a loss. Naama takes Udi home and discovers that he's capable of arousal, so (like Lot’s daughter) she gets him drunk on wine and makes love to him in his sleep. This highlights what turns out to be a very significant aspect of Udi’s problem: He had become bored with the routines of his marriage and family life. The story, as narrated by Naama, becomes a kind of Proustian recollection of the marriage, which reached its high point in the happy months following Noga’s birth but has declined steadily in the ten years since. Can those early days be recaptured? Naama, as valiant a wife as any in the Book of Proverbs, tries, taking Udi on vacation and bearing his bad temper with astonishing fortitude—but whatever it is that ails him, it goes very deep. A clue is offered by Zohara, an acupuncturist who tells Naama that she and Udi have been blessed, not cursed, with this malady, and that they should not be in a rush to see him recover. New Age drivel? Or simply a new way of looking at old problems? Maybe Milton knew what he was talking about when he spoke of the “happy fall” from Eden.
Probably too ornate for some, but a beautifully written story that carries great weights of meaning.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8021-1718-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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