Yehoshua's masterful portrayal of a female musician at a pivotal moment in her life is deep, unpredictable, and, in the end,...
Noga, an Israeli harpist based in the Dutch city of Arnhem, confronts hidden truths about herself during a visit to Jerusalem following the death of her loving father.
The 42-year-old Noga has agreed to stay for three months in her family's old apartment in an increasingly Orthodox section of Jerusalem while her mother tries out a retirement home in Tel Aviv. Noga's younger brother, Honi, a media producer, devised the plan. To keep Noga busy, he sets her up as an extra in various productions, among them an outdoor staging of the opera Carmen. The drama onstage is nearly met by the drama off it when Noga's ex-husband, Uriah, shows up. Though he's remarried and the father of two, he's still furious at her for her refusal to have children. Judging from her hilarious efforts to prevent the Hasidic kids from the apartment upstairs from brazenly sneaking into her mother's place to watch TV, she may not be cut out for motherhood. Noga reserves her greatest love for music; nothing thrills her more than joining her orchestra in an upcoming performance of Mozart's “Concerto for Flute and Harp.” But as hinted at by her father's advice to always keep an eye out for Venus, from which her Hebrew name derives, the universe has its own designs on her. The ease with which Yehoshua captures the inner life of his quirky heroine in all its lush undertones and self-enforced solitude is special. For the great author of Five Seasons (1988) and The Liberated Bride (2003), this is a comparatively short book. But its terse, offhand narrative is rich in reflection and personal truth.
Yehoshua's masterful portrayal of a female musician at a pivotal moment in her life is deep, unpredictable, and, in the end, surprisingly suspenseful.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-60970-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
IN THE NEWS
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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