A sweeping novel, set in Shanghai and elsewhere, of the high life between the wars in which a rich young Englishwoman torn by loyalties to different cultures, and oppressed by a stifling marriage, finds true love at last. Aging Clio Oliver, McLeay's (Passage Home, 1990, etc.) latest protagonist, starts writing her life story on a visit to Shanghai, the city where she was born in 1910. It begins with her family's return to England in 1923. There to attend grandfather Matthew's funeral, Clio recalls seeing a woman and her young son stand apart from the Oliver family at the ceremony. The woman's presence seemed to disturb Clio's father and Uncle Kit, who have just inherited the Oliver shipping empire. Clio, soon sent to boarding school, misses ``the enchanted security'' of her Shanghai house and garden. She fondly recalls her unusual but surprisingly happy childhood there: the loving Chinese governess who brought her up after her mother died; her father's concubines; and the sensual dancing lessons given her by two young Russian exiles, Igor and Nina. Despite the family's immense wealth, English life seems drab, and, though Clio is soon caught up in the rituals of the upper class, she is never really happy. The young boy at the funeral turns out to be Stephen Morgan, whose mother, Catherine Oliver, had been ostracized by the family for marrying a sailor; Stephen is eventually, reluctantly, brought into the family business. Clio travels, parties, and makes a suitable but increasingly unsatisfying marriage. Then her marriage takes her briefly back to Shanghai, now under Japanese assault and much changed. But wherever she goes—Shanghai, the Scottish Highlands during the war years—Stephen, not only a brilliant businessman but a war hero, is somehow always there to rescue her from bombs and betrayals. One of those beguilingly detailed period novels too intelligent to be froth and too unpretentious to do more than tell an absorbing story with panache and conviction.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14271-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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