by Alain Claude Sulzer & translated by John Brownjohn ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2008
For all the sexual intrigue, Erneste seems a bit like a Camus character in a Thomas Mann setting.
This short, evocative novel combines a romantic melodrama of homosexual love and betrayal with deeper meditations on the passage of time, the essence of truth, the deception of desire and the inevitability of death.
Originally published in Germany in 2004, this is the first novel by the veteran Alsatian author to be translated into English. The “perfect waiter” of the title is Erneste, who has spent his life serving guests at a Swiss resort hotel after his sexuality estranged him from most of his family. With the approach of World War II, an irresistibly attractive young German named Jakob arrives to work at the hotel. Though Erneste has long kept the guests, his fellow employees, even life itself at what he considers an appropriate distance, he can’t keep his eyes off Jakob. And then his hands, though it isn’t until the more impetuous Jakob makes a reckless advance that Erneste becomes his lover as well as his roommate and mentor. The ambitious Jakob quickly joins Erneste in the dining room, where they are careful to keep their relationship secret. The narrative alternates between the mid-1930s, when the two began their seemingly insatiable relationship, and the mid-1960s, when Erneste hears for the first time in 30 years from Jakob, who had abandoned him almost as abruptly as he seduced him. The opportunistic Jakob had attracted a hotel guest, prosperous German novelist Julius Klinger. Two desperate letters from Jakob (now “Jack,” apparently on his own in New York) bring Erneste and Julius together. The extent of Jakob’s duplicity comes as a shock to the impeccably mannered, brokenhearted waiter. Had Jakob ever loved either man? Was sex simply bait or a bargaining chip for him? Did either of the men he seduced for his own advancement know Jakob at all, or had desire blinded them both?
For all the sexual intrigue, Erneste seems a bit like a Camus character in a Thomas Mann setting.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59691-411-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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