Repetitive, smarmy and self-satisfied. Slumming never seemed quite so bourgeois.
Dissolute writer with a yen for rough trade goes to Romania, finds rough Romanian.
Novelist Benderson (User, 1994, etc.) lards his account of an obsessive, nine-month affair with a Romanian hustler with sentences like the following: “No one has to explain to me that the forces we depleted bourgeois intellectuals sometimes borrow for our transgressive narratives never free themselves from their unstable sources.” The author’s pseudo-boyfriend Romulus never quite shed his scam-artist attitude or gave up heterosexual flings during their relationship. Ah well, the perils of transgression. The writer first showed up in Bucharest in 1999 on a weeklong assignment for an editor who wanted a good story about brothels, “something personal and literary.” Wolfish, devilishly handsome young Romulus became almost overnight an obsession for Benderson, who immersed himself not only in a starved, priapic worship of his new beau, but in the ancient reek of Romania’s tortured past. Fortunately for the author, that history is a pretty juicy soap opera, especially the story of Carol II, last king of the pre-Fascist era, and his half-Jewish mistress Lupescu, who was turned by popular anti-Semitic legend into a Mata Hari/Cleopatra hybrid responsible for the country’s supposed degeneration. Carol’s relationship with his domineering mother Marie provides more grist for Benderson’s imagination, as he endlessly ponders the parallels between that dynamic and his own Oedipal-lite bond with an overpowering mom. For hundreds of pages, the author tries to find grand meaning in his tawdry affair, whose banality he realizes long after the reader has. Explosive descriptions of decadent Romanian cities and the Iron Curtain–wracked countryside are about all that enliven this swooning, tedious book.
Repetitive, smarmy and self-satisfied. Slumming never seemed quite so bourgeois.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2006
ISBN: 1-58542-478-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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