Sturdy characters and an endless batch of surprises make the glaring translation problems relatively easy to overlook.
Getting the largest piece of a wealthy man’s inheritance may drive his children to undertake a few bad deeds, including murder, in the English-language version of Douglas’ debut thriller.
When billionaire Robert Stanley is run down in an automobile accident in Corsica, his three grown children feel they deserve a sizable chunk of his estate. After all, their relationships with their father have been strained for years after his affair with their governess, Rosa, led to their mother’s suicide. And they need the money: Judge Thomas Stanley, the oldest brother, is enamored with Connie, who has expensive tastes; fashion designer Carmen is paying off a blackmailer; and polo player Billy has a heroin addiction. But everything changes with the appearance of Jennifer Stanley, Robert’s illegitimate daughter with Rosa. Someone wants controlling interest in Stanley Enterprises—not to mention even more money—and is willing to do whatever it takes to get it, even murder. Douglas does an outstanding job establishing the story’s characters. Robert, for example, is undoubtedly the villain, callously sending his kids to separate schools when it was clear that they blamed him for their mother’s death. But the children are well-developed, particularly Thomas and Carmen, whose self-made careers are the result of showing Robert that they could make something of themselves. The novel is shrouded in mystery and brimming with plot twists: there’s the strange family man who watches his son’s baseball game before breaking into the office of Robert’s attorney and the children exhuming Robert’s body (for a DNA test to prove that Jennifer is related) and finding an empty coffin. Likewise, the story is bolstered by a bit of dark humor, like the French police captain who stalls releasing Robert’s body to lawyer George so he can soak up the press’ attention for as long as possible. The translation to English from Spanish unfortunately hits some stumbles, with an abundance of typos and odd phrasings, including an explanation of the title: “[Robert] looks at one of the crew member almost angry and this change his mood. He obviously has a very bad mood.”
Sturdy characters and an endless batch of surprises make the glaring translation problems relatively easy to overlook.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1614000037
Page Count: 478
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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