A journey into the heart of acting that’s ever entertaining but at times transcendentally overblown.
Sarah Bernhardt’s declining years, as highly fictionalized as Braver’s debut, Mr. Lincoln’s Wars (2003).
At Manhattan’s Booth Theater in 1880, Bernhardt makes her American debut as Marguerite Gautier in Camille and draws 29 curtain calls from the ecstatic audience, until Bernhardt calls for the house lights to go up. The audience had been stunned by the young artist’s mastery of Marguerite’s death of tuberculosis (the 19th-century’s great romantic illness), and, outside the theater, some 5,000 people await her exit. Leap ahead to Los Angeles 1906, and Bernhardt’s struggle to find again the power and insidiousness of Marguerite’s consumption. What’s more, her gay agent and beloved friend Max Klein warns: the Catholic Legion of Decency, which puts actresses and whores on equal footing, has shut down LA and will not allow the infamous actress to perform there. So the show’s been moved to nearby Venice (the town that’s recently been remodeled with Venetian waterways and gondolas). Bernhardt’s private train car hasn’t arrived yet. During her week alone in Venice, she’s pursued by the press and by ace reporter Vince Baker, who is fairly astounded (along with 50 other reporters) to see her catch a ten-pound sea bass from a Venice pier, split it open with her hotel key, and plunge her face into the entrails, perhaps to awaken her fading spirit. She no longer has the energy to fight the press as in years past. (Her famous wooden leg won’t show up for another nine years.) Now 61 on her farewell American tour, Sarah’s been an opium addict since 1880—hop sometimes enhances her performances. Onstage, her presence overshadows her art. Standout scene: Sarah alone with Edison, on cocaine and recording Hamlet’s soliloquy in English and French (available from EMI). At 76, Sarah still plays Marguerite.
A journey into the heart of acting that’s ever entertaining but at times transcendentally overblown.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-054407-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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