This vast, inordinately ambitious follow-up to Solzhenitsyn's long-aborning magnum opus The Red Wheel (whose first volume August 1914 appeared in English translation in 1972!), published in Russia in 1993, will alternately frustrate, exhaust, and generously reward readers willing to grapple with it. In a polyphonic narrative that sweeps from remote eastern villages to the Western Front of WWI, where grenadiers nervously await the resumption of stalled hostilities, Solzhenitsyn scrupulously juxtaposes the impersonal march of historical events against intimate views of representative individual lives caught up in their momentum. As the European war grinds on, depleting resources and alienating ordinary citizens from Russia's indifferent royal family (Tsar Nikolai II and his "Empress" Aleksandra) and the ineffectual royalist parliament ("Duma"), both the militant Constitutional Democratic Party ("Kadets") and the more narrowly nationalist Bolsheviks plot the destruction of the monarchy. Regimental commander Giorgi Vorotyntsev (a pivotal character in August 1914) sinks into increasing despair over his country's disastrous involvement in an unwinnable war (" . . . people must be made to realize that all things, even Russia, have limits"), as his "betrayal" of his trusting wife foreshadows the overthrow of the Tsar. Other varying attitudes toward military intervention, domestic economic policy, the treatment of Russia's Jews, and several more equally "knotty" topics are embodied in such vividly drawn characters as "liberal"-thinking artillery officer "Sanya" Lazhenitsyn; soldier Blagodarev (whose return home occasions an impassioned depiction of his impoverished village); Cossack-born firebrand journalist Fyodor Kovynev (a caricature of Soviet-approved novelist Mikhail Sholokhov), and the wily Swiss "millionaire revolutionary" Parvus—who conspires with "Lenin in Zurich" (the title under which this long section was published separately in 1976). Inevitably, all this is impressive—even despite the interminable conversations that these and other passionately engaged characters frequently indulge in. If Nobel laureate Solzhenitsyn is a great writer, it's in the same way that Dreiser and Zola are great writers. The Red Wheel sequence is unlike anything else in contemporary fiction (or, indeed, since its obvious inspiration: Tolstoy's War and Peace). Therefore, be warned. But do attempt it.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-374-22314-9
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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