A loose string of events that shows little evidence of much emotional investment, on Jungk’s part, in his characters,...
German-American novelist (The Perfect American, p. 244) and biographer (Franz Werfel, 1990) Jungk offers a disjointed tale about a mathematician by the name of Tigor, who, in troubled midlife, drifts on a series of fruitless, ill-connected adventures.
Having abandoned a mathematics conference in Trieste, and his teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania, Tigor ends up in the wilderness (“the plant room”), where he wanders harmlessly before resurfacing in the town of Belluno and being arrested for vagrancy. Dreamy and garrulous, Tigor makes friends wherever he goes, and newly met strangers happily tolerate his memories of growing up as the son of a famous opera singer. Tigor has a love for the theater and ends up in Paris to work as a rigger at the Odeon, while living at the home of his doting granduncle, Arnold Bohm. Tigor endures the riotous staging of Treplyov’s Masha and the insufferable preening of stars. But he’s no nearer to offering a justification for his “dereliction of duty toward his students.” Decamping to Moscow, he joins another mathematics professor and goes to Yerevan, capital of Armenia, where he becomes enthralled by a group of nationalists convinced that the remains of Noah’s Ark are still unclaimed on Mount Ararat. As a mathematician concerned with proving a hypothesis, Tigor (whose name seems to derive from a legendary Armenian king, Tigran II) is chosen for the mission of unearthing the remnants, thus proving the veracity of the Divine Books. Despite his misgivings, and after a spell teaching English to the children of Yerevan, he undertakes the task, and, in a bizarre close, he ascends the mountain without proper climbing gear or knowledge of the ongoing Kurdish civil war.
A loose string of events that shows little evidence of much emotional investment, on Jungk’s part, in his characters, providing the reader scant chance to warm up to his oddly named hero. The result: a listless, cold-eyed, quixotic romance that seems to suffer in translation.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-59051-118-2
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Handsel/Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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