An unlikely pilgrim and his stuttering progress, drawn with unnerving atmospherics and all the delusions and torments on the...
In a world of surreal distortions and impending danger, a Russian soldier struggles with the banality of evil.
This slim novel centers on Evgeny Savelyev, newly assigned as junior lieutenant to a grim outpost of the Russian army fighting Islamic militants in an unidentified land. Savelyev is a fraught man, his mind at war between notions of habit and free will, acceptance and pursuit, good and bad. In the bleak, snowbound detention center to which he’s been placed, he will be tempted with lust and ill-gotten gains, appalled by cruelty and everyday wickedness. He will also encounter innocence, elemental decency and lessons about how to conduct himself with simple moral clarity in a seemingly unredeemable world. As the soldiers from the detention center go about their midnight raids to round up suspected militants–Prendergast provides just enough details to let the reader’s imagination conjure horrible images of their fates–Savelyev dreams of a different comrade altogether, a “sober, moderate, hard-working, humble, peasant type, ever striving to be more, to be a prince or princess.” Two of his mates personify these traits, eschewing moral absolutism. But Savelyev is rudderless and yearns for black and white, his inexperience and desires vying with courage and the confounding complexity of human nature. Fortunately, the dolorous Savelyev never becomes ponderous; Prendergast’s writing is parsimonious, incisive and as stark as the landscape it paints. He skillfully deploys the eloquence of reticence: His characters are as bright and evocative as Persian miniatures; his skirmishes with the great existential concerns of dignity, unjust punishment and faith–the fodder of classic Russian literature–are terse but not elliptical, glancing but cutting as well, at ease with the discomforts of ambiguity. While there is little doubt about the destiny of the Russian occupation machine, where moral decay has metastasized throughout the system, even within the beast there remain opportunities for righteous individual action. Epiphany and redemption coalesce from the mists that fed Savelyev’s weakness and fall from grace, presenting a chance to derail yet another travesty. “You can’t save everyone,” the good comrade tells him. “First, try just saving yourself–you. That is something special in itself.” It will also be Savelyev’s ticket to heaven.
An unlikely pilgrim and his stuttering progress, drawn with unnerving atmospherics and all the delusions and torments on the road to self-realization.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-595-43895-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
