Vyleta conjures an appropriate landscape of gloom and ruin and sends too many people off to wander in it.
A dour excursion into a pocket of postwar Vienna, shaped by parricide, lost loves and remnants of Nazi malevolence.
This sequel to Vyleta’s 2012 novel, The Quiet Twin, moves the action from pre–World War II Vienna to 1948, as two people return to the city: Robert, a young man trying to uncover why his stepfather was thrown to his death from a window of the family home, and Anna, who wants to locate her long-missing husband, the doctor at the center of the previous novel. Robert’s old home is occupied by a nightmarish cast of characters: His mother is lost in drugs and alcohol and unwilling to part with her portrait of Hitler; his stepbrother, Wolfgang, stands accused of murdering his father; and Wolfgang’s wife is a study in ignorant lassitude. The home is being cared for—or barely so—by Eva, the hunchbacked maid of the title, who bitterly mocks Robert’s efforts to understand what’s happened. Life at Anna’s old home is only marginally better, as her efforts to locate her husband bring her into the orbit of a U.S. expat journalist and an earnest ne’er-do-well, as well as Robert, with whom a semblance of romance blossoms. As in The Quiet Twin, Vyleta piles on intersecting characters but not always to useful effect; if Eva is meant as a symbol of the degradations of a decade under the Nazis’ iron hand, she’s too unlikable and too absent from much of the narrative to do the job well. Wolfgang’s trial gives the novel a lift, encapsulating the mood of bloodlust and suspicion that seems to consume the city. But the multiple plot vectors dampen the story; by the time the fate of Anna’s husband finally becomes clear, it registers little emotional effect.
Vyleta conjures an appropriate landscape of gloom and ruin and sends too many people off to wander in it.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-809-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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