Jewish humor lives in this frequently hilarious and thoughtful collection by the author of such classics as Stern (1962) and...
Friedman, now in his mid-80s, adds to his wide-ranging body of work with a sprawling comic novella about a faded filmmaker and stories about being old, lonely, and morally challenged.
The novella relates the misadventures of William Kleiner, a once-respected director who goes to Israel for the first time in 1990 to scout locations for a Jewish Star Wars. For all the wonders around him, he's in a sour mood, and getting only cricket scores from Sri Lanka on the radio doesn't help. Nor does the presence of Mahmoud, a young Israeli Arab bellhop who repeatedly appears in his room without knocking and begs the American to help him get to his brother's wedding in New York. This Kleiner agrees to do after the kid comes to his rescue when he cracks his head on a marble slab of great religious significance near Christ's tomb. In America, Mahmoud pitches a great idea for a blockbuster and becomes a Hollywood player himself—not to mention close partners with "the big-breasted Borscht Belt beauty" of Kleiner's dreams. Larry David has nothing on Friedman in finding the absurd in ordinary situations, but the short stories here have a dark underside. In one of them, a Jewish writer numbed by Nazi terrors struggles with an assignment from Joseph Goebbels to write an entertaining satirical piece for the party tabloid. In another story, a former Iowa English teacher, asked to write stories in an afterlife where no literature exists, struggles to remember the plots of great books so he can pass them off as his own.
Jewish humor lives in this frequently hilarious and thoughtful collection by the author of such classics as Stern (1962) and The Lonely Guy's Book of Life (1978).Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1173-0
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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