Cercas’s lyric intensity becomes quite moving (especially toward the end) in a beautiful account of loss and reconciliation.
Cercas’s US debut is a strange and intriguing amalgam of epic, elegy, and mystery about a journalist’s efforts to uncover the story behind a soldier’s quasi-miraculous escape from firing squad in the Spanish Civil War.
How much of the tale is fiction, many readers will ask, since most of the characters are historical figures and the narrator, like the author, is a Spanish writer named Javier Cercas—but never mind all that. We begin with a broken-down journalist in a provincial town who has written a few novels that flopped and is depressed because his father has died and his wife has left him. While researching an article commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, Javier hears an interesting legend and works it into the piece: Nationalist hero Rafael Sánchez Mazas, founder of the right-wing Falange Party and onetime cabinet minister under Franco, was once captured by leftist troops, shot by firing squad—and survived. Not only that, but afterward, making his way across enemy lines, he was discovered and recognized by a Communist guerrilla: an unknown militiaman who deliberately let him get away. Among the usual letters to the editor after the article is published, Javier receives contradictory leads as to the true identity of the soldier, and he becomes increasingly intrigued. He tracks down the son of a Communist partisan who sheltered Sánchez Mazas during his escape and discovers a notebook kept by the escapee describing his ordeal. Eventually, he pieces together an account of Sánchez Mazas’s exploits during the last days of the war, and he finally meets the man whom he believes spared his life. But is it really him? It doesn’t matter—like the sled in Citizen Kane, the man in the forest (whoever he was) eventually becomes much less interesting than the search itself.
Cercas’s lyric intensity becomes quite moving (especially toward the end) in a beautiful account of loss and reconciliation.Pub Date: March 7, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-384-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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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