Fans of Russian absurdist satire will most enjoy this offbeat, if uneven, debut.
Marcus’ debut novel depicts the aimless life of a third-rate Russian artist.
The author states on the book’s back cover that he was inspired by a visit to a museum that contained a great deal of very bad art; the artworks’ only notable characteristic was their enormous size. Vladimir Daniilovich Myukis, nicknamed Volodya, appears to be Marcus’ imagining of the sort of artist who would create such work. Volodya, orphaned in World War II, is rescued from gang life by a policeman who notices his skill at drawing and maneuvers him into an art school run by the Soviet NKVD police agency. Volodya later spends most of his adult life working in the art department of an auto manufacturer—a front for the KGB—but eventually he makes his way to Brooklyn, N.Y., after the fall of the Soviet Union. He ends his days there working in a Jewish delicatessen. The high point of his life is a love affair, brutally cut short when his ex-KGB fiancee is transferred to parts unknown just two weeks before their planned wedding. In the end, virtually all his paintings are destroyed. Whenever he paints a mural, the building is inevitably razed or shelled, and when he stores his paintings in a garage, its Pakistani owner is mistakenly picked up for “extraordinary rendition” and his property confiscated. When he makes a major sale of animal paintings, they’re used for target practice by hunters impressed by their realism. There’s little in the way of drama here; the story is told in a mock-documentary style, and its nonlinear structure forces the narrative into discrete episodes. The author ably depicts the hopelessness of life in the Soviet Union, but in the end, he doesn’t clarify Volodya’s relationship to his art—is he a bad artist because he has little talent, because he has no muse, or because his bureaucratic superiors thwart him?
Fans of Russian absurdist satire will most enjoy this offbeat, if uneven, debut.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479721535
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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