THE FORTUNATE ONES

Name: THE FORTUNATE ONES
Author: Ellen Umansky
ISBN: 978-0-06-238248-1

by Ellen Umansky ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Umansky’s richly textured and peopled novel tells an emotionally and historically complicated story with so much skill and...

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A missing painting connects the lives of Rose, a woman who escaped the Holocaust as a young girl, and Lizzie, a 37-year-old lawyer whose father just died.

After Rose’s parents put her and her brother on the Kindertransport from Vienna to England in 1939, she never saw them again. Also gone was The Bellhop, a painting by the expressionist Chaim Soutine. Over the years that followed, both Rose and The Bellhop separately found their ways to Los Angeles. The painting was purchased from a New York gallery by a wealthy eye surgeon named Joseph Goldstein, displayed in his steel-and-glass mansion overhanging a ravine in Los Angeles. When his daughter Lizzie, then 17, threw a wild house party when he was out of town, the painting, as well as a Picasso sketch, was stolen. Rose’s husband read of the theft in the paper; she contacted Joseph. But Lizzie and Rose do not meet until Joseph’s memorial service. By then, Lizzie’s life has been as shaped by the missing Bellhop as Rose’s has—for both, the painting’s departure from their lives coincided with a brutal loss of innocence. Lizzie is powerfully drawn to Rose, trying to build their coincidental connection into a real friendship over coffee dates and movies, and you can see why. Despite all her losses—on top of the Holocaust, her adored husband has recently died—Rose is an elegant, smart, utterly direct woman who loves the films of Roger Corman, tolerates no fools, and has strong opinions on everything. Her boyfriend is a Bruce Springsteen maniac. It is his offhand question about the insured value of the stolen artwork that drives Lizzie back into the investigation. A few of the plot developments at the end of the book are a little awkward, but when’s the last time you read a novel that didn’t have that problem?

Umansky’s richly textured and peopled novel tells an emotionally and historically complicated story with so much skill and confidence it’s hard to believe it’s her first.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-06-238248-1

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.