An eccentric, engaging mix of melodrama and erudition.
A true tale of love and madness in Belle Epoque Vienna serves as the basis for this Booker nominee.
Princess Louise was the daughter of Leopold II—King of Belgium and the genocidal owner and self-styled emperor of the Congo Free State—and the wife of Philipp, Prince of Saxe-Coburg. Géza Mattachich was a Croatian of dubious pedigree and a minor officer in the Austrian army. The very public affair between this unlikely pair scandalized Viennese society and delighted fin-de-siècle leftists. Jacobson (The God-Fearer, 1993, etc.) begins his story in 1895, when Louise and Mattachich both fall prey to love—or, at the very least, intense fascination—at first sight, following the pair from the earliest moments of their liaison and into ignominy, exile and insanity. It’s the sort of story that would seem preposterous if it weren’t fact-based, and Louise and Mattachich are characters so outsized that they would lack all credibility as pure invention. Despite their very different backgrounds, the lovers actually have a great deal in common. Both are greedy, venal, paranoid and spectacularly self-centered. Their obsessive romance is, in fact, a sort of narcissism: What they seem to adore most in each other is the self reflected back. Shared psychopathology is, of course, no guarantee of domestic bliss, and Louise’s social position, combined with the duo’s utter lack of discretion, pretty much precludes any happily-ever-after ending. Instead of a fairy-tale romance, then, this is an elegant, astute and smartly entertaining depiction of an emotional train wreck. Jacobson makes excellent use of historical research. His narrative is buttressed with informative and opinionated footnotes, and he includes telling excerpts from the memoirs of Louise and Mattachich. Histrionic and fabulously self-serving quotes from the principals are balanced by the narrator’s incisive, occasionally ironic and coolly engaging tone.
An eccentric, engaging mix of melodrama and erudition.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-8103-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend. A young couple content with the humble living allowed them by the syndicate which controls the sale of the mediocre pearls ordinarily found, find their happiness shattered when their baby boy is stung by a scorpion. They dare brave the terrors of a foreign doctor, only to be turned away when all they can offer in payment is spurned. Then comes the miracle. Kino find a great pearl. The future looks bright again. The baby is responding to the treatment his mother had given. But with the pearl, evil enters the hearts of men:- ambition beyond his station emboldens Kino to turn down the price offered by the dealers- he determines to go to the capital for a better market; the doctor, hearing of the pearl, plants the seed of doubt and superstition, endangering the child's life, so that he may get his rake-off; the neighbors and the strangers turn against Kino, burn his hut, ransack his premises, attack him in the dark — and when he kills, in defense, trail him to the mountain hiding place- and kill the child. Then- and then only- does he concede defeat. In sorrow and humility, he returns with his Juana to the ways of his people; the pearl is thrown into the sea.... A parable, this, with no attempt to add to its simple pattern.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1947
ISBN: 0140187383
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1947
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