The plot, however, rarely matters with Charyn. He is who he is: endlessly quirky, just about inimitable, and definitely an...
Love in a Siberian climate.
After back-to-back sorties into nonfiction (Gangsters & Gold Diggers, 2003; Bronx Boy, 2002), Charyn returns to the crime novel, setting his latest in Moscow, a place easily as murderous as the New York City of his ten-volume Isaac Sidel series (Citizen Sidel, 1999, etc.). In the Russian capital under the Boss, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, everyone walks warily, shoulders scrunched, the sneak attack a staple of everyday life: “Nobody could ever be spontaneous in Moscow, where each move, each gesture was tinged with ambiguity.” To put it mildly. Into this volatile milieu ventures a basically inept acting company, from outlying Tiflis, to perform, of all things, King Lear. It’s meant to be a six-week run in the kind of shabby, exurban theater sophisticated Muscovites wouldn’t be caught dead patronizing—until the amazing advent of a 19-year-old shambling giant of a man, Ivanushka Azerbaijan. Out of necessity one night, he goes on as Lear, replacing the troupe’s sulking actor-manager. No real experience, outrageously un-Lear-like in appearance, Ivanushka takes the stage and something alchemical happens. “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” he cries, and audiences (tiny at first, SRO later) go crazy: Moscow falls in love with him and a star is born. Even Stalin, in his own monstrous way, falls in love with him. Ivanushka, in turn, falls in love with his Cordelia, who has long since fallen in love with writer/NKVD agent Volodya Rustaveli, and also long since with Timosha, Maxim Gorky’s daughter-in-law, who for complicated reasons is being slowly poisoned to death by the aforementioned Rustaveli. Got that? Never mind, sooner or later, Stalin, that great simplifier, sticks most of the cast in the gulag.
The plot, however, rarely matters with Charyn. He is who he is: endlessly quirky, just about inimitable, and definitely an acquired taste.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56858-312-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
