Startling, vivid, unforgettable: a novel that compels the reading imagination.
With this stunning incantation on the life of Doc Holliday, Olds solidifies the reputation he established with his debut about John Brown (Raising Holy Hell, 1995) as the Dark American Soothsayer.
By nature a poet with an extraordinary sensitivity to the sounds of words, Olds here sets out a biography of sorts: a character-chant that, like his first novel, makes use of contemporary news accounts, interviews both real and invented, fragments of poetry, excerpts from textbooks, and photographs that flavor the original writing as it deals out the tale of Doc Holliday’s life. “In the end, the object is always the same—to reconnoiter the poetry that lies at the heart of any history, to make the marrow sing,” he writes in an afterword. Olds approaches his subject first through themes, providing both a clinical and a personal account of the consumption diagnosed at 21 that finally killed Holliday at 36, then nicely dovetailing this material into a treatment of Doc’s penchant for gambling. Olds carries the motifs of life and fate, gambling and luck straight to the center of the American fascination with fortune and individual enterprise, composing a critique unprecedented in its acuity and grace. He next presents Doc’s life among friends, drawing portraits of Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Bat Masterson that leave the weathered chaps, ten-gallon hats, and quick-draw machismo far behind. After rendering the mythical confrontation at the OK Corral in gorgeous, operatically controlled prose, Olds concludes with Doc’s dreamy, craven, painful death in a bed bloodied by his coughing. Characteristically, the author heads for the fringes of American culture yet declines to write in a style that simply mirrors his subject, instead seeding the tale with his own style of ravishment. He wields the most lyrically lucid prose and poetically charged sensibility this country’s literature has known in a very long while.
Startling, vivid, unforgettable: a novel that compels the reading imagination.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-11727-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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