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 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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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