A slender but memorable contribution to the literature of crime and (sometimes self-inflicted) punishment.
Pensive novel of political terror and its consequences, set in the shadow of post-junta Brazil.
Born in 1961, just in time to experience the military dictatorship for herself, Bracher turns out a somber slice-of-life narrative centering on a professor who, after a long career in education, is preparing to leave the academy, sell his house, and move to the countryside. Gustavo knows that when he leaves his home, “a developer will tear it down, like all the other old homes nearby.” It doesn’t matter, for he lives in his mind, and there he faces incapacitating guilt over the death of his late wife’s brother, arrested with him as student activists in 1970. “Look, I was tortured,” he protests, “and they say I snitched on a comrade who was later killed by soldiers’ bullets.” Protest as he might that he didn’t do it, that he didn’t talk, Gustavo worries endlessly at his responsibility for Armando’s death—and the death of his grieving wife afterward, “without ever finding out that I’d said what I never said.” Scarred by his experiences in prison, Gustavo has scarcely dared profess a political view since; in fact, he confesses, he is retiring from his job “out of cowardice,” precisely to avoid getting caught up in a revolt against changes in the very pension system that will provide his keep even as he is cheated out of part of it. He protests further: “I was never a revolutionary, never participated in the enthusiasm.” He protests, in the end, too much, and the reader is left to mistrust a narrator who has rationalized for half a century that his comrade and friend, though not deserving death, brought his fate on himself. Bracher’s story turns in on itself, revisiting those long-ago moments from the point of view of an old, tired man consumed by the deeds and misdeeds of youth.
A slender but memorable contribution to the literature of crime and (sometimes self-inflicted) punishment.Pub Date: July 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2736-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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