Random sharp insights and images are studded inside this leisurely and oddly innocent chronicle of British Gen-X slackers.
Dyer, the prolific British essayist and novelist who now lives in the U.S. and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011), published his first novel—an impressionistic, affectionate portrait of a group of 1980s British bohemians—in the U.K. in 1989.
A nameless narrator and five close friends in their mid-20s spend their days eating, drinking, smoking grass, talking and doing as little actual work as possible while living in the Brixton neighborhood of London. The narrator works dead-end marketing research jobs. Freddie, the narrator’s oldest and perhaps closest friend, is a would-be writer who seldom actually writes. Carlton obsesses about keeping his apartment clean. Steranko, whom the narrator envies and wishes he were more like, paints. When the narrator and Steranko both fall for beautiful Foomie, the narrator is not surprised that she chooses Steranko. Or that his own sister, Fran, and Steranko share an attraction. Sexual undercurrents run everywhere, but there is no sordidness and not much actual sex. Friendship is the important currency here. The narrator is a romantic, capturing images of his daily life in what he calls “an album of snaps.” He witnesses a stranger being beaten on the Tube but doesn’t step in; he meets a girl he’s attracted to, then remembers they met months before; he’s mugged but not hurt. He watches moments of random kindness and moments of cruelty. His friends have good and bad times. They discuss Nietzsche and listen to jazz. They live on the dole, getting stoned and wasted regularly. The narrator not only observes, but feels according to the situation: frequently boredom, occasionally fear, very occasionally exhilaration. This is less a plotted novel than a smudged valentine to young-adulthood friendships and the setting where they take place, 1980s Brixton, a slightly seedy, multiethnic district of London populated by immigrants and artistic types who live uneasily side by side.
Random sharp insights and images are studded inside this leisurely and oddly innocent chronicle of British Gen-X slackers.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-55597-677-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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