Sometimes more interesting for its revelation of little-known aspects of Cuban history than for its revelation of...
García’s third (after The Aguero Sisters, 1997, etc.) again lyrically portrays several generations of a Cuban family, this one with Chinese roots.
In 1857, a Westerner in Amoy fools 20-year-old Chen Pan into signing on for indentured labor in Cuba, where “the women were eager and plentiful [and] . . . even the river fish jumped, unbidden, into frying pans.” After the horrific sea voyage disabuses him of such fantasies, Chen Pan survives more than two years on a sugar plantation, befriending some of the African slaves before escaping to Havana, where he prospers as a merchant and buys a young black woman who becomes his lifelong companion. Interwoven with the couple’s history are narratives about their granddaughter, Chen Fang, born in 1899 during her father’s brief sojourn in China, and their great-grandson, Domingo Chen, who immigrated to New York with his father in 1967. Chen Fang becomes a victim of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and Domingo falls in love with a prostitute while serving in Vietnam, but their stories are sketchy and pallid compared to the richness of Chen Pan’s experiences in Havana, a city with a multicultural vigor drawn from the clamor of different cultures and races. In 1867, in Havana, “the vendors hawked fresh okra and star apples, sugarplums, parakeets, and pigs’ feet . . . [and] from the moment he arrived, [Chen Pan] knew it was where he belonged.” His descendants in China and America never belong in the same way, and their tales are left unfinished, though the novel hints at sad ends. Chen Pan, by contrast, survives the loss of his beloved Lucrecia to see dramatic changes in now-independent Cuba, and he dies drinking the red wine a friend had promised would make him immortal.
Sometimes more interesting for its revelation of little-known aspects of Cuban history than for its revelation of characters, but Chen Pan lingers in the memory as a brooding, contemplative patriarch.Pub Date: April 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41056-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn’t seem more familiar with his characters or territory.
Manhattan in the late 1930s is the setting for this saga of a bright, attractive and ambitious young woman whose relationships with her insecure roommate and the privileged Adonis they meet in a jazz club are never the same after an auto accident.
Towles' buzzed-about first novel is an affectionate return to the post–Jazz Age years, and the literary style that grew out of it (though seasoned with expletives). Brooklyn girl Katey Kontent and her boardinghouse mate, Midwestern beauty Eve Ross, are expert flirts who become an instant, inseparable threesome with mysterious young banker Tinker Grey. With him, they hit all the hot nightspots and consume much alcohol. After a milk truck mauls his roadster with the women in it, permanently scarring Eve, the guilt-ridden Tinker devotes himself to her, though he and she both know he has stronger feelings for Katey. Strong-willed Katey works her way up the career ladder, from secretarial job on Wall Street to publisher’s assistant at Condé Nast, forging friendships with society types and not allowing social niceties to stand in her way. Eve and Tinker grow apart, and then Kate, belatedly seeing Tinker for what he is, sadly gives up on him. Named after George Washington's book of moral and social codes, this novel documents with breezy intelligence and impeccable reserve the machinations of wealth and power at an historical moment that in some ways seems not so different from the current one. Tinker, echoing Gatsby, is permanently adrift. The novel is a bit light on plot, relying perhaps too much on description. But the characters are beautifully drawn, the dialogue is sharp and Towles avoids the period nostalgia and sentimentality to which a lesser writer might succumb.
An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn’t seem more familiar with his characters or territory.Pub Date: July 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02269-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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