An amusingly fast-paced, if willfully deranged, parody of the spy thriller genre, by the prizewinning author of Cherokee (1987) and Double Jeopardy (1993). Winner of both France's Prix MÇdicis and the 1990 European Literature Prize, this is a comic-surrealist romp, long on ingenuity and short on conventional logic and unity, done up in the agreeably eccentric manner of Raymond Queneau, with nods in the direction of the experimentalist Ou Li Po group of writers (which Queneau inspired), whose best-known member was the late Georges Perec. When Franck Chopin, an entomologist who dresses like Oscar Wilde and moonlights as a ``spook,'' is enlisted by the mysterious Colonel Seck to dog the footsteps of the even more mysterious economist Vital Veber, the stage is set for an intricate cat-and- mouse game that takes Chopin to such unmapped and alien territories as the Parc Palace du Lac, a hotel that isn't listed in any of the guidebooks. Similar confusions attach to Chopin's reluctant mistress Suzy Clair, her missing husband Oswald (who will of course turn up when least expected), a closemouthed ``cryptanalyst,'' a menacing beauty who turns out to have been the former Miss Sebastopol, and an aggressively physically fit thug whose code name is ``B-12.'' It all ends with a byzantine ``exchange'' that mystifies more than it resolves and with the befuddled Chopin's recognition of ``his status as pawn, as bit player.'' The equally befuddled reader may share that sentiment, but will probably have a fine good time anyway. Though Echenoz scorns to explain overmuch, he fills this gracefully loony book with fresh and appealing comic detail, limned with zany lyricism and eye-catching metaphors (a heavy rain ends, as ``the sky finished wringing itself out''). Polizzotti's translation effectively captures Echenoz's infectious love of verbal and narrative juxtapositions, and provides relatively easy entry into the world of a uniquely clever and likable novelist.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56792-054-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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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