A brilliant novella that incisively portrays a lonely boy's passage through obsessive religiosity toward madness, from the great Belgian author of The Sorrow of Belgium (1990) and other highly acclaimed works as yet mostly untranslated. Written in Flemish and originally published in 1989, this latest from Claus succinctly contrasts the fantasy life of preadolescent Martin Ghyselen with the passions that divert and all but destroy his family and neighbors in a tightly knit and isolated village rife with ethnic, religious, and sexual tensions. Martin's divorced mother Sybille surrenders to the fevered attentions of Headmaster Goossens, whose ``lyric drama'' being prepared for an upcoming ``Culture Weekend'' reveals his fascination with her namesake ``the goddess Cybele.'' The Ghyselens' hired man Richard, a former veterinarian, now impoverished and homeless, diverges dangerously from his former habit of ``helping women'' (who were pregnant and unmarried). And young Martin, imagining himself variously as the heroic Clint Eastwood, the ``terror of the seas,'' and especially as the misunderstood and martyred Jesus, distorts and rejects reality in ways that are crucially and mockingly mirrored in the affairs of his adult counterparts. Written in an elliptical prose whose harshness and sardonic wit are expertly caught by Levitt's graceful translation, this hypnotic short novel reveals the erratic pulse of a culture in the manner of GÅnter Grass's also short book Cat and Mouse. Patterns of conflicting and provocative imagery (fertility-barrenness, Christ as a fish) further enrich a disturbing and yet dazzling picture of small-town conflict and crisis. The good news is that much more of Claus's fiction remains to be translated into English. The sooner the better.
Pub Date: April 16, 1997
ISBN: 0-7206-0985-2
Page Count: 106
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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