A bumbling lummox turned business superstar in 15th-century Europe is the hero of the first volume of a promised historical series, by the author of several mysteries and the Francis of Lymond novels. Claes is an oversized apprentice in the dye-shops of the Charetty company; he's widely known to be humble, clumsy and hilarious, with a streak of inventive genius. His numerous pranks have incurred the wrath of the town leaders of the merchant city of Bruges, culminating in a near-fatal fight with the handsome and loathsome Simon of Kilmirren. Marian de Charetty, the widowed owner of the company Claes serves, offers her beleaguered apprentice the option of joining a band of mercenaries on their way to Milan. Claes counterproposes that the small army act as a courier service, carrying documents over the Alps. On arriving in Milan, Claes calls on the local branch of the Medici and on other powerful personages, tantilizing them with carefully gleaned information and trade secrets he's pieced together from letters he's carried and codes he's deciphered. He also drops a provocative hint: that the monopoly on alum (the scarce white powder used to bind dye to cloth) that this group enjoys is threatened by the so-far secret existence of a new, conveniently located mine. The Medici become a major customer for Claes' courier (and information) service, and they pay him well to keep quiet about the alum. Claes heads back to Bruges, where suddenly he's someone: dealing with all the businessmen who once rolled their eyes at his juvenile tricks, he wheels and deals, makes new contacts, and acts as the brains of the expanding Charetty business—and, always the lady's man, he has a top-secret affair with the spunky Katelina van Borselen, a young noblewoman. Then owner Marian makes a business proposition: she asks Claes to up his respectability by marrying her. For the sake of the firm, he accepts. Now known as Nicholas (or Niccolo), he heads back to Milan for more business triumphs. And brave new plans are in the offering. A knotty confusion of names, places and schemes, but overall an engrossing, often witty portrayal of the early throes of commerce, fleshed out with satisfying characters and complex alliances.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1986
ISBN: 0375704779
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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