“I prefer travelers’ tales to love stories,” says our narrator. There are plenty of both in this lyrical novella.
A voyage—if not of the damned, then certainly of the heartbroken.
Seghers, who died in 1983, was a prominent writer in the former East Germany, complicit but not uncritically part of it. Given that stories in Stasiland were best off delivered under a veil, she wrote deflectively, with stories within stories and multiple narrative points of view containing thin criticisms of things as they were. So it is in this book, originally published in German in 1971. Its protagonist, Ernst Triebel, is not its narrator, a dutiful engineer named Franz Hammer who services agricultural machinery. In that role, work has taken him to Brazil, from which, returning to the GDR, he meets Triebel, a longtime exile who is unenthusiastic about medicine and star-crossed in love. He has stories about both, and there are others to pick up the narrative onboard as well, for, as Triebel says, “We’ve enough time for storytelling…almost three weeks.” The stories themselves, wrapping around allusions to Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness, build on themes of lost friendship and unrequited love; they tend to be simple and direct, but in the end they are also commentaries on the nature of storytelling itself. As the book proceeds, other themes come into play, such as the baleful legacy of German nationalism and anti-Semitism. There’s no grim social realism in these pages but instead a delight in the pleasures of spinning tales in detail-caressing language, not least when describing the Beatrice of the piece: “She’s as lovely, lithe and golden brown as some girls of this city,” Triebel achingly recalls of his childhood love, another German exile in Brazil. Throughout are surprising glimpses of life behind the Wall, as when Seghers writes of the hope of her generation that West Germany would not remain divided from the East but would instead unify with it for a glorious future.
“I prefer travelers’ tales to love stories,” says our narrator. There are plenty of both in this lyrical novella.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-935084-94-5
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Dialogos
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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