Touching and honest, but unsatisfying all the same: Samuel’s monologue seems, not surprisingly, to be written more for the...
A somewhat lugubrious debut from French playwright Reza (the Tony Award–winning Art).
In the tradition of Mauriac, Reza has created an intensely interior work, essentially a long monologue by an old man who looks over the events of his life as he faces the prospect of death and eternity. Samuel, the narrator, is a Parisian Jew who spent most of his life in the garment trade and did quite well. He keeps an apartment in town but spends more of his time in the country, in the home of Nancy, his second wife. His daughter is married to a dutiful but unimaginative pharmacist, and they have a baby boy—the narrator’s only grandchild. Samuel’s son is on a “sabbatical” year abroad, wandering from Mombasa to Kuala Lumpur to God-knows-where, and Samuel addresses much of his meditation to him, wondering what he is going to do with his life and when he is going to find some direction. An avid gardener, Samuel meets Genevieve Abramowitz, an old friend, at a flower show in Paris one day and proceeds to spend the rest of the day with her. As they reminisce about old friends and lovers (this is Paris, after all), Genevieve tells him how she “killed” their mutual friend Leo Fench (who had been Genevieve’s lover) by dropping him for another man. Samuel, for his part, recalls a long affair he had with Marisa Botton, the wife of one of his clients in Rouen. Cantankerous, rude, and cheap, Samuel is not the sort who inspires love easily, but his long confession, although seemingly pointless at times, succeeds in humanizing him and opens his heart to a degree that one rarely finds in first-person narratives. By the end, he has become more sympathetic than one could have expected.
Touching and honest, but unsatisfying all the same: Samuel’s monologue seems, not surprisingly, to be written more for the stage than the page.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41087-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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