Born in 1904, Gombrowicz was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1968, a year before his death. This largely autobiographical novel, published in Paris in the 1950s, will sorely disappoint the international readership that embraced his celebrated Diary (Vol. I, 1988; Vol. II, 1989). Calling the novel Gombrowicz's ``greatest accomplishment as an artist,'' Stanislaw Baranczak (Polish Literature/Harvard) explains in his introduction, that it is written in the form of a ``Baroque nobleman's oral tale, known in the Polish tradition as gawda.'' In such tales, the protagonist's self-deprecating adventures are supposedly conveyed for entertainment. (For American readers, a better comparison might be to a cautionary tale or medieval allegory.) The novel opens in 1939, when Hitler was about to invade Poland and many residents were fleeing. Arriving in Argentina with little cash, the narrator (who shares the author's name) goes directly to the Pan Minister in an attempt to find work. The Minister pays no attention until he learns the man before him is an author, at which point he hires Gombrowicz to crank out propaganda. Against his better judgment, the writer is thrust into a competitive literary society comparable to the old Japanese courts in which poets matched wits. Feeling demeaned (whether by his benefactors' jokes at his expense or because propaganda is beneath him), Gombrowicz proceeds to mock people he's introduced to, winning their hearts with such gibberish as: ``I don't like Butter too Buttery, Noodles too Noodly, Millet too Millety, and Barley too Barley.'' The inverted grammar and frequent capitalizations make it difficult for contemporary readers to follow the action, let alone laugh. French and Karsov include a pronunciation guide and a glossary of words they felt would be lost in translation. One can't help wishing they'd thought twice about translating the book at all.
Pub Date: May 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-300-05384-3
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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
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
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