Italian writer Jaeggy's fourth book but first to be published here: a short novel that intensely evokes the cruelties and tragedies that flourish in an ``Arcadia of sickness, where something serenely gloomy and a little sick is going on.'' The narrator recalls a time, in postwar Switzerland, when she was a 14-year-old student in a boarding-school for girls from all over the world. The students were mostly privileged but lonely girls like the narrator—whose mother had remarried and gone to Brazil and whose father lived in a succession of expensive hotels- -or like the homesick daughter of the president of an African country. The girls are still innocent, but ``there is something crude, pedantic, and affected about it, as if we were all dressed in plus fours and long socks.'' And, indeed, the innocent rivalries of competing friendships are tinged with a corrupting cruelty of ignorance and conformity. It is also a place where ``obedience and discipline set the tempo''—which seems to suit a new pupil, the learned and accomplished Frederique, whose presence obsesses the narrator. She wants Frederique to admire her, but Frederique is ``entire unto herself''—a person of great self-discipline whose conversations, though profound, suggest a basic nihilism. Finally, the narrator's strategy to win Frederique fails because ``I still thought that to get something you had to go straight for your goal whereas it is only distractions, uncertainty, distance that bring us closer to our targets, and then it is the targets which strike us.'' Memories of that time are followed by brief references to an adult life forever affected by Frederique, and the speaker's last meetings with the now-adult Frederique, who ``has become like a saint, the most disciplined of us all'' but ultimately obedient to the point of madness. Very European in its underwritten evocations of overwrought sensibilities, but beautifully crafted. A writer to watch.
Pub Date: May 26, 1993
ISBN: 0-8112-1235-1
Page Count: 112
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
