This inordinately ambitious novel by the Russian ÇmigrÇ author (The Winter’s Hero, 1996, etc.) flies off in so many directions that few readers will be able to focus clearly on its intermittent considerable strengths. It’s the picaresque history of singer-actor Alexander “Sasha” Korbach’s 13-year (1982—95) odyssey in and out of favor with Soviet authorities, pursuit of the good life in America, and lifelong search for a personal aesthetic—a “new sweet style” compounded of abstract universal and mundane specific elements, as was the dolce stil nuovo Dante created for his Vita Nuova. Aksyonov tells Sasha’s often beguiling story in a distractingly avuncular voice that addresses the reader directly and indulges in arch metafictional play with fractured allusions to his own early novels. And the story is heavily laden with commentary: on Soviet paranoia and deceitfulness and the (not dissimilar) rot at the core of American culture, more specifically on the breakup of the Soviet Union (clearly paralleling Korbach’s own travail) in the 1990s. Still, Aksyonov’s ego-driven antihero is an engaging bundle of sexual and creative energies, and the parade of characters orbiting around him—his enthusiastically Americanized ex- wife Anisia, fellow Russian-Americans like Bellovian hustler Tikhomir Barevyatnikov and sexual gameswoman Lenore Yablonsky (who compiles an “impressive record of missions behind the lines in the American sexual revolution”), and especially Sasha’s American mistress Nora Mansour (note the surname) and her father, his “fourth cousin,” department-store millionaire philanthropist Stanley Korbach. They all have their own unruly reality, and help broaden the novel’s scope. The details of Sasha’s several careers—as filmmaker, professor, and “chairman of the Moscow branch of the Korbach Fund”—are also cunningly manipulated to bring the story to an absolutely stunning comic-apocalyptic conclusion in Jerusalem. Not an easy read, or a fully successful novel, but a piquant, flinty book brimming with provocative ideas and characters. Aksyonov’s fiction is well worth the effort it demands.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-44401-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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