A worthy effort, if a touch too elaborate, illuminating unknown corners of a great photographer’s life.
A pensive, sometimes ponderous imagining of the life of renowned photographer Edward Curtis, who ran away from the urban circus to join the Indians.
Curtis’s sepia-tint photographs are well known. His life is not. NPR book critic Cheuse (The Fires, 2007, etc.) attempts to situate Curtis in a historical time and within the context of the man’s long and interesting, if somewhat chaotic, life. This might have worked better as a biography than a novel, had not Laurie Lawlor’s Shadow Catcher: The Life and Work of Edward S. Curtis (1994) been first to market. As it is, Cheuse is forced to provide so much exposition in the story that, if it were a movie, the narrative would be more voiceover than image; this has the effect of slowing the narrative down and, from time to time, forcing it into cul-de-sacs. That said, Cheuse’s approach to Curtis, who wanted nothing more than to escape the stifling city and the close confines of his marriage to roam the plains and deserts with the last unimpounded Indians, is sympathetic and affecting; says the book’s narrator to the photographer, “You’re an unusual man but you’re not more than human,” and indeed Curtis emerges as lifelike but never larger than life. By Cheuse’s account, Curtis’s chief blemish is a kind of proprietary jealousy: He would sooner smash his glass-plate negatives, irreplaceable though they may be, rather than see them fall into the hands of his estranged wife, and so he does. Borrowing a page from Doctorow and perhaps Brian Hall—whose imaginings of the lives of famous men are much more vivid blends of fact and fiction—Cheuse studs the narrative with historical figures from Theodore Roosevelt to Cecil B. DeMille, who move the story along even as they helped Curtis in real life.
A worthy effort, if a touch too elaborate, illuminating unknown corners of a great photographer’s life.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4022-1404-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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