While the complex plot intrigues, there is so much violence, so much dirty scheming, that even when the “good guys” win,...
Rome is a hotbed of political corruption, violence, and scheming at the end of Silvio Berlusconi’s reign as prime minister in this modern Mafia novel.
Some of the most powerful Mafia families in town, led by a shadowy figurehead known as Samurai, are taking advantage of the unrest to hatch a multibillion dollar plan to build a luxury waterfront development that will also give them full control of the nearby port of Ostia. But Mafia egos are notoriously delicate, and, inevitably, murder will undercut the spirit of "family" cooperation. The novel begins with a politician covering up the death of a prostitute he's just had sex with, which leads a relatively unimportant gang member to overestimate his power. When he ends up murdered, the response from his family is swift. In the middle of this vicious quagmire stands one smart and noble Carabinieri, Marco Malatesta, himself a product of the violent streets. With help from the magistrate Michelangelo de Candia and a firebrand leftist named Alice Savelli, Marco not only uncovers the complex plans and the murders at their heart, but also sets his sights on Samurai, determined to catch the puppet master once and for all. The novel is set in a very specific time, and it is a novel of Rome, meaning that the city itself, in all its history, glory, and despair, is skillfully sewn into the fiber of the tale. At the same time, there is something old-fashioned about the narrative, because it clearly evokes Mario Puzo’s famous trilogy and other classics of the genre. It can be hard to keep track of all the characters, but loose ends are admirably tied up in the end.
While the complex plot intrigues, there is so much violence, so much dirty scheming, that even when the “good guys” win, it’s hard to muster up much hope for Rome itself.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60945-407-4
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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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