A stylistically brittle, psychologically intense story of a young man who knows that his time is almost up.
A new translation of a long-lost philosophical novel by the late Jewish Romanian writer Blecher (1909-1938).
The shadow of death falls heavy over this linguistically complex and passionate self-portrait of a young man in early-20th-century Romania who composes an epitaph for his childhood at the same time that he's experiencing it. This new English translation by the late Heim is more focused and contemporary than the versions found freely on the Web and probably gives readers a closer understanding of Blecher’s intent. This volume is also bookended by two excellent essays, written by Andrei Codrescu and Herta Müller, which provide context and some background on the author, who was diagnosed at a young age with spinal tuberculosis, lived most of his life in sanatoriums and died at age 28. On the surface, the novel is nothing more than a running internal dialogue by a boy observing the world around him—imagine a prewar, Eastern European Holden Caulfield filtered through the surreal and frightening lens of Franz Kafka but with considerably more teenage lust. His melancholy is so deep that he identifies moments of “crises,” which a doctor diagnoses as malaria. “In small insignificant objects…I find the melancholy of my childhood and the nostalgia of the futility of a world that engulfed me like a sea with petrified waves,” writes our nameless, hopeless narrator. At the same time, Blecher’s doppelganger is so firmly in the moment that he fetishizes both objects and people, giving women in particular an inherent eroticism that he clearly finds as frightening as he does compelling. It’s a ferocious act of self-awareness that the ailing Blecher was able to dig so deeply into his own psyche to portray the person he believed himself to be.
A stylistically brittle, psychologically intense story of a young man who knows that his time is almost up.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1760-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© 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.
