A virtuosic interweaving of myth, history, and imagination.
We’ve seen a number of interesting novels from the Netherlands lately, but few have been better than this engrossing saga of a Dutch Jewish family’s experiences of personal upheaval in the East Indies and WWII upon returning to Holland.
Their story is told in retrospect by Louise “Lulu” Benda, whose memories extend back to her early childhood in an exotic “paradise” where “gods” are believed to prowl lush gardens and figures from Javanese mythology seem every bit as real as Lulu’s father Cees, a compassionate doctor, her mother Hélène, and (maternal) Aunt Margot, plus the playful, vaguely sinister Felix, Cees’s brother, and—as Lulu barely intuits—a threat to both “Aunty Margot’s” happiness and her parents’ marriage. The enigmatic Uncle Felix is one of several omens (such as the tale of the sorrowful Javanese Princess Dewi Kesuma) that influence and complicate Lulu’s gradual understanding of the forces that drive her family back to Europe (first to the comparative safety of The Hague), and to the numerous relatives whom she encounters (the most memorable being her authoritarian “Granny Mimi,” who has “banned a number of topics of conversation, such as war and someone called Hitla”). Ruebsamen uses Lulu’s initially inchoate consciousness beautifully, building up a complex contrast between the limpid, seductive “song” of her innocent years in the Indies and the abrasive “truth” of her unhappy maturing in the crucible of her war-torn mother country. The tale is further distinguished by vivid, patiently assembled characterizations of such striking figures as Lulu’s stoical, stubbornly decent and heroic father, her young “other Aunt” Tinka (a child of the Indies who cannot survive in the sluggish, destroyed atmosphere of Holland’s “Wetlands”), and the Bendas’ affable maidservant Aleida, a perverse maternal figure whose powerful sexuality both repels and fascinates the preadolescent Lulu.
A virtuosic interweaving of myth, history, and imagination.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40261-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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
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
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