Brilliant storytelling by an author who continues to grow and impress (War of the Rats, 1999, etc.), and who, here, seems in...
A deeply felt antiwar suspenser about the savagery preceding the fall of Hitler's Berlin.
We see the giants—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin—jockeying for political advantage as WWII enters its final months. Crafty, experienced power players, super-patriots, and super-egotists, all are devoted to their own nation's well-being but also have a lively interest in how history will measure each of them. We follow the three, viewpoints shifting, as they charm and are charmed by, bluff and are bluffed by their opponent/allies in a contest that could hardly be more consequential. The Germans have been crushed; not even Hitler doubts the totality of his defeat. The only unresolved question is which of the victorious armies is going to be first in Berlin, and the maneuvering over this is both intricate and intense. Robbins renders his real people superbly, making them vivid, even fresh—a notable accomplishment, given how often these portraits have been drawn. But the heart of the story is his imagined cast: a Russian solder in disgrace, a German cellist hiding from horror behind her music, and an American photojournalist, sent by Life magazine to wherever the fighting is most vicious (think Robert Capa). In particular, Robbins's embattled Berliners are, in their diversity, convincing and unforgettable. Each experiences the war differently, of course, and yet the damage inflicted is, at the core, grievously similar. In the German capital, waiting to be taken, the people—panicky, starving, guilt-ridden—face stark choices in dealing with one another: “Be a hero or a monster” is the way one of them puts it. Robbins views it all unsparingly. Quoting Plato, he writes: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
Brilliant storytelling by an author who continues to grow and impress (War of the Rats, 1999, etc.), and who, here, seems in absolute control of his material.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-553-10830-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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