Told with deep empathy, this tale illuminates a little-known but relevant aspect of U.S. history and deftly explores...
In this debut historical novel, a girl and her family face harsh conditions in a German-American internment camp in Texas during World War II.
The daughter of a piano teacher and a math professor at the local college, Trudy Herman is a studious girl in sixth grade in Somerville, Virginia. She sorely misses her dead grandfather, a gentle man who taught her how to find the Pleiades in the night sky, but otherwise she leads a happy, normal life. That is, until three grim men show up at the Hermans’ front door, search their home, and seize Trudy’s father, a German immigrant, for reasons they won’t say. Trudy’s life falls apart. Her mother becomes a shrunken, fearful woman, and all of Trudy’s friends and neighbors shun her except for her classmate Eddie Gutschmidt, whose father was also taken. Eventually, Trudy, her mother, and Eddie’s family are forced to travel by train to Traybold, Texas, the site of a German-American internment camp. They carry on a reduced existence within the confines of a barbed-wire fence. Trudy finds comfort in books, Eddie’s friendship, and an old, cheerful woman named Ruth Schuler, but she is shocked by the guards’ cruelty toward “krauts” like her. Finally, Trudy’s father arrives and the family is reunited. Once the war is over, the Hermans end up in Mississippi, where they must rebuild their lives. Beck tends to tell more than show Trudy’s emotions (“Three wooden chairs were placed in a line….Two were occupied by Mom and me, and the third chair, where Dad should have been sitting, sat empty. My mood matched the room’s gray, and I felt lonely”). Still, the world through Trudy’s eyes is astonishingly vivid, from the fetid scent of a house her family stays in to the sight of a sandhill crane on a riverbank. And the sensitive and scrupulous protagonist is cleareyed on how people can adapt to anything, even internment, but maintains that the experience warps everyone: “Our lives took on a normalcy, but that troubled me even more. How could being kept inside a barbed-wire fence like cattle feel normal?”
Told with deep empathy, this tale illuminates a little-known but relevant aspect of U.S. history and deftly explores privilege and injustice in their many forms.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-377-9
Page Count: 283
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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