THREE FACES OF AN ANGEL

Name: THREE FACES OF AN ANGEL
Author: Jiri Pehe
ISBN: 978-0-9568890-4-1

by Jiri Pehe ; translated by Gerald Turner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 31, 2015

Set against the complex, turbulent political and cultural tableau of central Europe, Pehe’s sweeping novel confronts the...

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An expansive, multigenerational novel about Western Europe that takes on the big questions.

Besides being a novelist, Pehe is a political analyst and was an adviser to Czech President Václav Havel. This is the second novel in an ambitious trilogy, the first to be translated into English (by Turner). In Wim Wenders’ acclaimed film Wings of Desire, set in West Berlin, unseen angels watch over their human charges. Here, an angel, Ariel, visits three generations of a Czech family, the Brehmes, from the late 19th century to the early 21st. Pehe’s wide-ranging story touches on two world wars, the Holocaust, Soviet expansionism and its demise, ending in New York City on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. In the first part, Ariel instructs Joseph Brehme to write a long letter to his mother, who abandoned him when he was 6. It’s 1940; he’s 40 years old. We learn he grew up in “two linguistic worlds” (Czech/German) and studied music and violin in the bustling, creative Prague of Jaroslav Hašek, Max Brod, and Alfons Mucha. He fought in a Czech brigade in 1914 and lost two fingers. Part 2 opens in 1968 during the Prague Spring. Hanna, Joseph’s daughter, is confined to a psychiatric hospital. Under Ariel’s influence, she takes pen to paper to tell her harrowing story of being taken in by Jewish grandparents and hiding to escape the German occupation of Prague. As Hanna writes, “I must…most of all try to explain it.” Her section is highly affecting and well-drawn. The third part, weakest of the three, opens in 2001. Hanna’s son, Alex, a famous, disillusioned American professor, feels Ariel’s influence in the guise of his girlfriend, Leira. His diary completes Pehe’s powerful saga of this Czech family.

Set against the complex, turbulent political and cultural tableau of central Europe, Pehe’s sweeping novel confronts the existential questions concerning God’s existence and man’s brutality to man.

Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-9568890-4-1

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Jantar Publishing/Dufour

Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE GOLDFINCH
by Donna Tartt

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THE LITTLE FRIEND
by Donna Tartt

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.