Not quite as dynamic as Sebastian’s more explicitly political work, the novel is still a compelling portrait of desire in...
A young man's romantic and sexual exploits are examined from various angles in this novel first published in 1933.
In the first section of Sebastian’s (For Two Thousand Years, 2017) second novel to appear in English, a young Romanian medical student arrives at a guesthouse in the Alps. He has just completed his exams in Paris and has come to take a rest. Instead, he becomes involved with three different women at the guesthouse—romantically and sexually—and, all in all, there’s little rest to be had. His name is Stefan Valeriu. In the novel’s second section, time shifts forward and perspective shifts sideways. Valeriu is now narrating—not his own exploits, this time, but the sad situation of a girl he once knew, with “an impoverished, joyless life.” The novel shifts twice more after this: First there is a letter to Valeriu from a woman to whom he has apparently proclaimed his love; and, last of all, Valeriu returns to the first person to describe an earlier affair with a former acrobat. Sections are titled after the women they describe: Émilie, Maria, Arabela, and so on. But even though the novel takes as its main subject the romantic entanglements of its main character, there is something else, too, seething beneath this current. The novel was written in the years between the two world wars, and though no explicit reference to politics or history is ever made, the shadows of the wars are felt quite forcefully in each discrete section. Sebastian himself was a Jew from Romania who wrote openly about his experiences. Eventually, his friends abandoned him. He survived the Second World War only to die in a freak accident in 1945. Sebastian’s other, perhaps stronger, work deals more directly with the legacy of the wars, but this novel is no throwaway, either: It’s an edgy account of sexuality, desire, and the strictures of contemporary relationships.
Not quite as dynamic as Sebastian’s more explicitly political work, the novel is still a compelling portrait of desire in its many convoluted manifestations.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59051-954-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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