A powerful, if sometimes confusing, narrative of two young people losing their innocence and gaining a new sort of knowledge during the Spanish Civil War. Matute, the most prominent 20th-century Spanish woman writer, wrote a trilogy about Spain's civil war entitled The Merchants. In this, the second volume, translated adeptly by Nugent and JosÇ de la C†mara, Matute employs a third-person narrative, which lapses into first-person parentheticals to reveal personal sentiments and secret histories, to portray the struggles of Manuel and Marta, who, thrown together by time and circumstance, use each other to find themselves amidst political upheaval and private betrayals. Manuel, 19, discovers that he is not the son of his mother's husband, a poor man killed by the Fascists some time ago, but rather the son of a rich gentleman who recently died and declared Manuel his official heir. Manuel must come to terms with his mother's pleas that he not turn away from the security that his inheritance offers his poverty-stricken family. He must also address his alliance with the now-imprisoned activist Jeza, a mysterious intellectual who says little but unites many. After Jeza is killed, Manuel goes to Jeza's wife, Marta, to break the news. As the two become acquainted, Marta reveals the details of her oppressed life. Raised by a mother afraid of getting old, Marta was virtually kept locked in the attic until she escaped with her mother's lover at the age of 18. But this lover provided a new sort of prison until he introduced her to his brother, Jeza, whom Marta decided to join in the uprising. Together, Marta and Manual return to the ruined house on the island off the coast of Spain from which Jeza conducted his activities—and here they finally find an unlikely peace. Readers willing to put in the time to make sense of Matute's challenging techniques of indirection will be richly rewarded with an important and fascinating work.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-935480-67-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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