Elegant and carefully assembled, but hobbled by a persistent solemnity.
Based on actual events, Ledgard’s somber first novel tells the story of a few dozen ill-fated giraffes brought from Africa into communist Czechoslovakia in 1973.
Thirty-two giraffes, to be exact, which here become 32 towering symbols for a grim, misguided Soviet regime. The story is told by Emil, a “haemodynamicst” who’s charged with safely shepherding the animals, captured in Africa, from West Germany via barge across the Iron Curtain. The narrative becomes duller, with the imagery more gray, as Emil drifts deeper into Czechoslovakia. But other voices emerge, including that of a giraffe named Snehurka (Czech for “snow white”) and Amina, a sleepwalking factory worker who takes a liking to the animals when they arrive in her hometown. Amina’s sections bring some grace and a touch of magical-realism to the prose that’s absent elsewhere—her discussions of her dreams and factory work (she colors Christmas ornaments) brighten the story even while they expose how glum and oppressive her world has become. The herd grew to nearly 50 by April 30, 1975, when a virus forced the authorities to approve a secret purge of the animals, and more characters arrive in the chapters that relate the nightmarish task. Their perspectives—of a virologist, a sharpshooter, a slaughterhouse worker—give the book a propulsiveness that’s lacking in the earlier portions. Ledgard, a Scottish-born foreign correspondent for the Economist, has clearly gone to pains to get the details of this hidden communist-era scandal, and the book might have worked better as an extended piece of reporting. Ledgard creates potent, beautifully observed passages, but his metaphorical connections are obvious—Amina’s no more a sleepwalker than her doctrinaire comrades, and the noble giraffes can see above the walls erected by the myopic communist regime.
Elegant and carefully assembled, but hobbled by a persistent solemnity.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2006
ISBN: 1-59420-099-8
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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