There’s elegance, insight, tenderness, and craft aplenty in this pensive, melancholy story, but its insistent restraint and...
In Berlin, in the aftermath of World War II, three disparate lives come together.
In keeping with its title, this second novel from Raeff (Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia, 2002, etc.) delivers its story of haunting events and slow-burning passions with cool detachment. (It also reunites readers with some characters encountered in Raeff’s story collection, The Jungle Around Us, 2015.) Bracketed within a contemporary narrative thread set in the oppressive heat of Morocco, where Isaac goes to visit Ulli, now a hotelier in Meknes whom he hasn’t seen for 40 years, is a long sequence of flashbacks, beginning with Ulli, a teenager in Germany in 1937, embarking on her first love affair. Leo and Isaac meet as soldiers in Arizona, both medically unfit to fight: Leo has a faulty heart valve; Isaac is asthmatic. The trio comes together in a bar in postwar Berlin in 1945, and so an emotional triangle is formed, with Leo and Ulli as its lovers and Isaac the dependable friend. Enduring loyalties are forged between all three, but the relationships shift over time: Ulli loves and marries Leo but isn’t happy; Leo has kept secrets from Ulli which will eventually force them apart. Their children, Simone and Juliet, must accommodate parents whose emotional trajectories create ever larger distances, while Isaac’s role is to step into the caring void left by the other two. All this history is slowly unpeeled between scenes in Morocco where Isaac and Ulli try to bridge what has separated them.
There’s elegance, insight, tenderness, and craft aplenty in this pensive, melancholy story, but its insistent restraint and distance bleach away intimacy; it’s as if readers are viewing the characters through the wrong end of a telescope.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61902-817-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A timely debut that not only reminds readers of a shameful episode in American history, but cautions us to examine the...
Sentimental, heartfelt novel portrays two children separated during the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
In 1940s Seattle, ethnicities do not mix. Whites, blacks, Chinese and Japanese live in separate neighborhoods, and their children attend different schools. When Henry Lee’s staunchly nationalistic father pins an “I am Chinese” button to his 12-year-old son’s shirt and enrolls him in an all-white prep school, Henry finds himself friendless and at the mercy of schoolyard bullies. His salvation arrives in the form of Keiko, a Japanese girl with whom Henry forms an instant—and forbidden—bond. The occasionally sappy prose tends to overtly express subtleties that readers would be happier to glean for themselves, but the tender relationship between the two young people is moving. The older Henry, a recent widower living in 1980s Seattle, reflects in a series of flashbacks on his burgeoning romance with Keiko and its abrupt ending when her family was evacuated. A chance discovery of items left behind by Japanese-Americans during the evacuation inspires Henry to share his and Keiko’s story with his own son, in hopes of preventing the dysfunctional parent-child relationship he experienced with his own father. The major problem here is that Henry’s voice always sounds like that of a grown man, never quite like that of a child; the boy of the flashbacks is jarringly precocious and not entirely credible. Still, the exploration of Henry’s changing relationship with his family and with Keiko will keep most readers turning pages while waiting for the story arc to come full circle, despite the overly flowery portrait of young love, cruel fate and unbreakable bonds.
A timely debut that not only reminds readers of a shameful episode in American history, but cautions us to examine the present and take heed we don’t repeat those injustices.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-345-50533-0
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories...
In Brooklyn in the early 20th century, The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor are intimately involved in the lives of their community.
When a depressed young man with a pregnant wife turns on the gas in his apartment and takes his own life, among the first to arrive on the scene is an elderly nun. “It was Sister St. Savior’s vocation to enter the homes of strangers, mostly the sick and the elderly, to breeze into their apartments and to sail comfortably through their rooms, to open their linen closets or china cabinets or bureau drawers—to peer into their toilets or the soiled handkerchiefs clutched in their hands.” By the time the fatherless baby is born, St. Savior will have been so instrumental in the fate of the young widow that the baby will be her namesake, called Sally for short. Sally will be largely raised in the convent, where her mother has been given a job helping out with laundry. The nuns also find a friend for the new mother—a neighbor with a houseful of babies—then they finagle a baby carriage, and “the two young mothers negotiated the crowded streets like impatient empresses.” This desperately needed and highly successful friendship is just the beginning of the benign interference of the Sisters in the private lives and fates of their civilian neighbors. Partly told by a voice from the future who drops tantalizing hints about what’s to come—for example, a marriage between the occupants of the baby carriages—this novel reveals its ideas about love and morality through the history of three generations, finding them in their kitchens, sickbeds, train compartments, love nests, and basement laundry rooms.
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back in her eighth novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-28014-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
PROFILES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
