A thoroughly imaginative tale of a family's rediscovery and re-creation of their dying father and themselves, by the author of After Gregory (1994), etc. Wright's story unfolds not only in the points of view, but in the thoughts and actual letters, speeches, dialogues, poems, and articles of its many characters. Thomas Westerly, a 72-year-old retired geology professor and college president, suffers a stroke at his home on a New England island, occasioning his many children and their various appendages to come form a deathwatch. Known to be ``a good man'' and a liberal, compassionate university president who's perhaps not suited to the politics of such a position, Thomas raised an unfailingly polite family, each member infused with his own love for writing and unwillingness to express real emotion. Their father suffered his stroke while attempting to intervene when a local bankteller, for unknown reasons, took his own family hostage. At first no one knows why, but Thomas approached the house and, shocked by the teller's warning shots, stroked out. Now, the family gathers, thinking death is near. The old man, though, begins to recover, then asks his oldest son to sort through his papers and remove anything unsuitable. Later, Thomas sneaks out of the hospital in the middle of the night, again headed for the hostage scene, and again suffers a stroke, this one fatal. More family arrive, each with their own relations to Thomas and to each other. Marriages collapse, secret love is had, and true feelings are slowly revealed. Meanwhile, Thomas's children, puzzled as to what exactly would be ``unsuitable,'' read through his papers, discovering that their reserved father had both a passionate and a dark side, parts of him they never previously benefitted from seeing. A wonderfully chaotic, unique look at a complex familywhat they really think of each other, how they truly are, and how they got that way.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-880909-36-7
Page Count: 285
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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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