Philosophy, mythology, humor, and love blend comfortably in this novella, which won the 1993 European Literary Prize for Dutch author Nooteboom (The Knight Has Died, 1990, etc.). When bookish bachelor Herbert Mussert awakens in Lisbon, his last memory is of going to bed in his solitary apartment in Amsterdam. Troubled and bemused by his amnesiac journey to the city—indeed the very hotel room—where 20 years earlier he shared a passionate sojourn with a lover now lost, he contemplates and discards one explanation after another. Then he sets out to revisit the cafes, boulevards, and harbor where he and Maria Zeinstra dallied two decades before. A teacher of biology in the same school where he taught classical languages, Maria mesmerized Herbert with her ability to transform the usual into the unique. Transfiguration—whether of a homely intellectual classics professor into a besotted lover or of the Latin language into sublime poetry—has always fascinated Herbert. Maria's elucidation of the ultimate metamorphosis from life to death and its essential link to love is rendered in a deadpan description of her classroom lecture on mating, death, and birth among a species of beetles; its flattened tone makes an unlovely subject fresh and slyly funny. Herbert also remembers his gifted student Lisa d'India, whose affair with Maria's doltish husband led to a tragedy of classic scope, diminished by the survivors' banal responses. One day, as inexplicably as he arrived in Lisbon, Herbert boards a boat bound for Brazil with a handful of other passengers. As they approach Brazil, each passenger reveals the hidden event that has led to their common destiny, and the mystery of Herbert's journeys is solved. Nooteboom scores with a pleasantly textured tale whose subtle mysteries keep the reader alert through all its diverting wanderings.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-100098-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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