by Dan Franck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 10, 1994
The thinly-charactered story of a marriage breaking up: a large bestseller in France. Nobody has names in this trendily streamlined narrative, but after seven years of marriage and two kids (known as ``the First Child'' and ``the Baby''), the wife announces to the husband that ``I've fallen in love with another man.'' The following ninety-five days are an extended kind of hell for the husband (a writer) as first he suffers deeply, then tries to win back the wife's affection (she claims she still loves him, although sex is a vanished thing), then swings into a high rage, then suffers still more deeply at the prospect of losing his children (``he goes out, drinks, smokes, snorts lines, smokes joints, screws. but every morning, inexorably, he comes back to his children's home''), then finally survives the separation, the wife getting the children. That there may well have been feeling, suffering, or pain in the origins of this tale isn't made the more compellingly believable by skin-deep people, disaster-struck metaphor (``He is on the bridge crossing the Seine when all at once the waters of the river and the waters of his tears collide''; ``He was completely unable to reconcile the external fires with the red lantern in whose glow he was wasting away''), or clumsy overreaching (``Fuck this society, he thought''). The translation can be uncommanding (``She wants to force me to look reality in the face''), though great care, admittedly, is taken with accuracy: ``His first film and his latest book were released at the same time, one in the theaters, the other in the bookstores.'' Says the publisher: ``350,000 copies sold in France. Soon to be published in eleven other countries.'' Zut!
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42453-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
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by Dan Franck & translated by Cynthia Hope Liebow
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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