A perfectly pitched anatomy of the immigrant experience of America: a moving blend of character study, satire, and elegy.
This nicely constructed and deeply felt novel, which marks the first English-language appearance of a former Russian scientist and translator, deftly observes the interactions of several Russian immigrants in America at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The émigrés are brought together for the last days of Alik, a free-spirited painter (his Last Supper depicts a table laden with 12 pomegranates) who’s slowly dying of an undiagnosed paralytic disease. His wife Nina, a paranoid alcoholic, begs the agnostic Alik to undergo baptism—a ceremony he agrees to discuss with a priest, if a rabbi is also present. As a sweltering heat wave bathes Alik’s rundown Manhattan apartment, his various friends, caregivers, and former lovers come and go (as, in nested flashbacks, Ulitskaya traces their personal histories): Irina, a onetime circus acrobat and freelance exotic dancer, now a lawyer, who quietly pays the blithely destitute Alik’s medical bills; beautiful, lovelorn Valentina, lured to America for what turned out to be a “fictitious” marriage; elderly, gnomelike Maria Ignatevna, a grandmotherly dispenser of “magical powers and contraband herbs”; and Alik’s self-appointed physician Fima, a doctor who can’t pass his US medical exams and works as a lab assistant; and some dozen others. Ulitskaya displays a keen eye for minutiae that vividly reveal character and situational contrasts (“The rabbi sat on the stool . . . which was still warm from the priest’s buttocks”) and images that precisely evoke the experiences of alienation and lostness (such as Alik’s dream in which, forced to hold the leashes of a pack of struggling dogs, he misses a flight and is unable to leave Moscow). And the contrast between Russian stoic fatalism and Americans’ casual sense of their society’s invincibility are spelled out in numerous delicately chosen details, each simultaneously underscoring her characters’ very distinctive personalities.
A perfectly pitched anatomy of the immigrant experience of America: a moving blend of character study, satire, and elegy.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2001
ISBN: 0-8052-4185-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 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.
