Israeli author Kenaz, published in English for the first time here, probes the perimeter and then the anguished center of helpless old age, to find within bitterness and fear, heroism and a kind of nobility. Unlovely, griping Mrs. Yolanda Moscowitz, a former French teacher, is recovering from a broken leg in a nursing institution. ``A big heavy woman, her face very raddled...with narrow slits of eyes pristine blue, clear and bright, like scraps of a lost distant sky.'' She takes great pains with her hair however, as if it ``had some magic power to protect her.'' Yolanda has no family; husband and kin have drained her life of freedom and promise. Yolanda is suspicious and puzzled by the friendly overtures of the painter Lazar, a fellow patient. ``Here is Inferno,'' declares Lazar, ``So what remains? A little solidarity, a little love, maybe?'' Lazar draws Yolanda's portraits; she is horrified by what he sees as ``ruins surviving a disaster.'' Throughout, dramas take place in the ward: a pale wraith of a pale life dies of a wasting disease; families warehouse their old and sick; nurses shield themselves, with anger or cold efficiency, from cries and demands that they cannot satisfy. Yolanda, given to heavy makeup and grotesque solo parades, fearing at one point that she has been invaded by ``someone else,'' begins to awaken, to see clearly ``the tragic inhuman beauty of the place.'' But at home in her small apartment again, she knows ``the world around her is emptying out.'' Then a mentally ill neighbor, who loves to see the cats in the courtyard, plunges to her death from her balcony. Yolanda and Lazar will have a final phoned dialogue of love, grief, and a poignant new self- knowledge, and Yolanda, above the courtyard, contemplates the glittering but unredeeming stars. This affecting entry from a new publisher (with send-off blurbs by Philip Roth and Amoz Oz.) plumbs with fevered intensity the ``bewilderment and frustration'' of old age's airless confinement.
Pub Date: March 23, 1994
ISBN: 1-883642-20-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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
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
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