by Thomas Hettche & translated by Elizabeth Gaffney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2003
Nothing innovative here, but Hettche manipulates the genre’s conventions, and the reader’s pulse rate, with enviable skill.
A possible miscarriage of justice drives the busy plot of this complex legal thriller, the first English-translated work of a popular German author.
Hans Arbogast, a married traveling salesman whose brief sexual encounter with a female hitchhiker resulted in her death, is convicted in 1953 of second-degree murder. Did Marie Gurth, a former resident of an East German refugee camp, die of strangulation?—or, as Arbogast ingenuously alleged, of natural causes following rough sex? It’s only after Arbogast has spent 16 years in Bruchsal Penitentiary that crime-novelist and human-rights activist Fritz Sarrazin and attorney Ansgar Klein manage to get the case reopened. All turns on whether an overzealous prosecutor coerced Arbogast’s confession and a prosecution witness willfully obscured details of an autopsy report that noted in the deceased woman’s body “a weakened condition as a result of a partial abortion.” (This is all based on a notorious real case.) Hettche maintains a brisk pace throughout, juxtaposing Arbogast’s prison experiences and confused memories of his misadventure with the actions of a host of involved legal, criminal, and forensic authorities. The result is a convincing cross-section of postwar German society, and the tantalizing implication that divisions among Hans Arbogast’s accusers and defenders parallel Berlin’s awkward status as a divided city. Sarrazin and Klein are absorbing characters, and the enigma of Arbogast continually deepens, particularly during his explosive retrial testimony. Hettche stumbles with the character of forensic pathologist Katja Lavans, whose interest in the case becomes more than clinical. But he rekindles interest smartly in the closing pages, in which the “accident” that caused Marie Gurth’s death is speculatively declared “an eruption . . . a vestige from the war that suddenly discharged.”
Nothing innovative here, but Hettche manipulates the genre’s conventions, and the reader’s pulse rate, with enviable skill.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-13812-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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
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