Erratic, often lyrically overpowering, bountifully imagined. This isn’t the Jewish One Hundred Years of Solitude, but one...
Strong echoes of Aleichem and Singer sound throughout this ambitious first novel, a piecemeal portrayal of a Jewish family in Europe, the Holy Land, and America from the 1830s to the present day.
The dual narrative is initially awkward: brief factual summaries (under the heading “My Father Writes”) offer capsule versions of longer stories told by a narrator eventually identified as “Nomi.” There follows a rich parade of colorful characters and dramatic incidents: some lavishly developed, others quickly sketched, many given a pronounced magical-realist coloring. Eve begins in Jerusalem with the figures of Rabbi Yochanan Schine and his adulterous wife Esther, then moves on (back and forth among Russia, Jerusalem’s Old and New Cities, and several other key locations)—in a manner that sometimes seems as haphazard as it is chronological and calculated—to focus successively on the happy marriage of “Avra the Thief” and her husband Shimon, an orchard worker in the village of Petach Tikvah (“the citrus-growing center of the Jewish Settlement”); the contrasting fates of their twin sons Zohar and Moshe, growing up during the flowering of Arab-Israeli tensions in the 1920s; the suspected murder, in 1851, of an esteemed ancestor; Zohar’s wife Miriam the seamstress, who “sews” stories both real and imaginary into the garments she creates; their participation in an underground illegal immigration movement during the (1940s) British Mandate in Palestine—an activity mocked by the “disappearance” of their deformed, in effect discarded youngest son Gabriel; and the dream-haunted, “uprooted” life of Gabriel’s brother (and narrator Nomi’s father) Eliezer, in Jerusalem and America. The metaphor of grafting is employed (and explained, in a concluding “manual of orchard terms”) to describe how this novel separates, splices, and otherwise connects the individual stories—even while acknowledging the ultimate mystery and unknowability (“Family chronology defies consciousness”) of the souls herein both preserved in memory and lost to history.
Erratic, often lyrically overpowering, bountifully imagined. This isn’t the Jewish One Hundred Years of Solitude, but one suspects Eve may yet be capable of producing it.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-41076-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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