None
The brothers Grimm meet Kosinski's The Painted Bird in the Hungarian-born Kristof's latest installment of the lives of identical twins Lucas and Claus (The Notebook, 1988). Separated by the postwar Communist invasion of their unnamed Eastern European homeland, Lucas and Claus lead very different lives. Lucas, who chooses to stay behind and bear witness to the horrors of life under the regime, keeps journals that later become the only proof of his existence in a place dedicated to eradicating the individual. At first, an archetypical innocent trying to survive by doing good, he remains in a cottage on the border (a landscape as menacing as that of a Grimm tale) where his mother and baby sister died (their skeletons are literally in the attic). Here, he witnesses shootings, feeds a local priest, and takes in Yasmine and her deformed baby Mathias, the product of Yasmine's incestuous love affair with her father. Incest is a recurring theme, as is necrophilia: a brother rapes his dead sister, and Lucas himself has a long affair with a woman who resembles his dead mother. When Yasmine leaves to find her father, Lucas and Mathias move to town, but Mathias, increasingly unhappy at school and jealous of Lucas's friendship with another child, hangs himself. Haunted by Mathias's fear of abandonment, Lucas exhumes Mathias's body and keeps it in the house, but then mysteriously leaves, thereby missing twin-brother Claus, who turns up again years later and adds another chapter to Lucas's story. The authorities suggest that the entire text is fiction: ``since neither the events described nor the characters portrayed ever existed in the town of K.'' Powerful writing, disturbing images, but this survival theme has too many familiar antecedents, and sexual aberration as a metaphor of times out-of-joint is equally worn.
None NonePub Date: Nov. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8021-1112-2
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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