Fresh and affecting takes on deep if familiar ground.
Fifteen finely crafted, interconnected stories, loosely based on the life of novelist Pilcer (a novel: I-Town, 1987, etc.), that cumulatively reflect the tensions haunting the children of Holocaust survivors,
Zosha Palovsky, named after her two grandmothers who died during the war, prefers to call herself Zoe. Though born in Europe in a camp for DPs, she was only a toddler when she arrived in New York with parents Genia and Heniek. Zoe’s predicament—how to reconcile her dreams with her parents’ experience—is central to each story. The first, “Do You Deserve to Live?,” is narrated by Zoe herself, who works for a movie magazine where she summons her “schlock muse” to write about stars, though she’d rather be writing about her family. She takes drugs, sleeps around, and says what she thinks, all shocking to her parents—especially Genia, who wishes she were a proper young lady. In school, she wants to be like the Latino girls who wear lots of makeup, and she refuses to go to a Yeshiva (“Paskudnyak”). In “First Story” and “Survivor’s Dance,” Genia revisits the past, recalling, respectively, how she was saved from the gas chamber because she was wearing a white head scarf and instead was sent to a labor camp; and how she met Heniek after the war. In “Our Father Our King,” Heniek recalls his escape from Auschwitz. As she grows older, Zoe, who once arrived stoned at a Holocaust Memorial Service (“Remember 6,000,000”), begins to appreciate her parents more, accepting the burden of their legacy. A visit to Auschwitz (“Imagine Auschwitz”) helps her understand why they wanted her to thrive when so many others had died. And in the final piece, “Blue Paradise,” Zoe—now married and herself a mother—vacationing with aging Genia and Heniek, rejoices that they can “grow old, as no other member of the family could, old enough to love a grandchild.”
Fresh and affecting takes on deep if familiar ground.Pub Date: July 19, 2001
ISBN: 0-89255-261-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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
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
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