A murky and elliptical descent into darkness.
German writer from the former GDR, Wolf offers her latest intellectual-personal foray (Medea: A Modern Retelling, 1998, etc.): a somber, spare, sensitive treatment of pain, illness and memory.
Having been brought to the hospital by ambulance because of abdominal pain, the unnamed narrator, who moves somewhat ambiguously from first to third person, offers a blow-by-blow testament of her treatment and deteriorating condition. Under the care of the taciturn head of surgery, Herr Chefarzt, and a succession of busy nurses, the patient is left helpless, vulnerable to the invading army around her who “inspect the drains, change the IV bottles, wash and reposition the thing my body is for them.” Laid low by a “runaway body,” the character’s mind cracks under the pain and drugs she’s subjected to, and a long life of memories begins to intrude. She recalls her relationships with a wily fellow East German and perhaps lover, Urban, who moves into high office and subsequently hangs himself in the woods after a crisis of conscience; a colleague and friend from the university, Renate, who loves Urban and is made miserable by him; and Aunt Lisbeth, who, in 1944 Berlin, has a child out of wedlock by a Jew. The patient is enchanted by mythical associations surrounding the name of one of her nurses, Kora Bachmann, who “will lead me into darkness. . . she’ll watch over me, keep an eye on my heartbeat, I’m reassured.” The speaker mines a kind of collective memory of Communist rupture and reinvention, and, lest the reader of English miss her literary and political allusions, the translator has provided a list of endnotes. Wolf deconstructs words such as collapse, cut, and expose, moving from the personal (pathological) definitions to the political. After meeting with Urban in the Underworld, the woman begins to emerge into health and light again, and yet the lasting impression of this work is dour and pedantic.
A murky and elliptical descent into darkness.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-56792-267-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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