Vol. II: “On the Sea” and Other Stories, 1883—84 $23.95, 300 pp. ISBN: 1-894485-02-5 Jan. 2000 The first two volumes of an ambitious gathering (and new translation) of all the Russian master’s early fiction—much of which appears here for the first time in English, having been deemed unworthy of preservation by Chekhov’s previous translators. Editor Sirin’s introduction pleads the case for resurrecting what are in many cases wan ’sketches” written for popular humor magazines, in the years when Chekhov (1860—1904) was starting his medical practice and assuming the burden of supporting his demanding family. Semifictional, possibly autobiographical vignettes (“Wedding American Style,” “My Anniversary”) and broad farces (“An Unhappy Visit”) dominate the first volume’s 32 inclusions. Nevertheless, several stand out: “He and She” skillfully lays bare the carefully managed hostility that binds a vain “European diva” to her smug husband; “For the Apples” offers an incisive satiric portrait of a malicious landowner, and “Two Scandals” efficiently delineates the vacillating relations of an inept soprano and the orchestra conductor who can neither tolerate nor forget her. Even the least substantial “stories” here uniformly display Chekhov’s matchless gift for swiftly establishing setting, character, and often even conflict and theme in a few brief sentences. But this mastery is more muted in the second volume’s 81 tales, many merely labored expansions of simple comic ideas gleaned, one infers, from both his professional and personal experiences and contemporary newspaper stories. Notable exceptions: “A Woman Without Prejudice,” who charms and surprises the lover bearing a “terrible secret”; “The Swedish Match,” a full-fledged detective story, and one of Chekhov’s most unusual works; “A Mysterious Woman,— which partially anticipates the justly famous “The Lady with the Dog”; and the radiantly absurd and moving “Death of a Civil Servant”—the first of Chekhov’s indisputable masterpieces. Sirin’s third volume, promised for late 2000, will contain more of the better-known and more fully developed stories of Chekhov’s tragically brief maturity. Still, even the juvenilia and ephemera of this writer constitute uniquely rewarding reading.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-894485-01-7
Page Count: 250
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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