A fresh and remarkable talent, evidenced in her novel Trust (1966) is here displayed in a group of short stories in which Miss Ozick softens the boundaries of irony while never scanting the ethical reference and reality that gave rise to it. In particular, most of the stories are set within the western Jewish experience; in general, however, they are tragicomedies about human unavailability, both to themselves and to each other, in an often monstrous universe. In "Yiddish in America" an aging, querulous and driven writer sublimates his own mortifications and anonymity in a ragged crusade for the continued use of the Yiddish language. Green with jealousy he attends a "Y" reading by a lionized Yiddish "mainstream America" writer, and searches the dark night for a translator to give him a voice in a present that finds him irrelevant. Two stories deal with satanic manifestations: a rabbi is trapped by a naiad; an urbane lawyer is set upon by an enormous and fleshly sea nymph. In the most moving story, "The Doctor's Wife," a kind, passively dutiful bachelor of fifty, among a family of parasitical combatants, accepts the knowledge that "accommodation becomes permanence," too late for anything but a sere autumnal haze of gentle lies. In the brief "The Butterfly and the Traffic Light," the answer to life's stops and gos may be simply to "live always at the point of beautiful change," a sardonic answer to unlovely transformation. Miss Ozick writes with the cutcrystal precision of Singer and the scouring tragic-ironic strengths of Malamud — exceptional stories all.
Pub Date: April 28, 1971
ISBN: 0815603517
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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